- HCLTech invests Rs 1,427 crore for a 10.46% stake in Sarvam AI startup
- Sarvam AI raises $234M in Series B, reaching $1.5 billion valuation and unicorn status
- Sarvam AI builds foundational models tailored for India's languages and data scale
HCLTech has announced a Rs 1,427 crore ($150 million) strategic investment in Indian AI startup Sarvam AI, securing a 10.46% stake.
The mega-deal anchors the first close of Sarvam AI's Series B funding round. With $234 million secured out of a targeted $300 million, the fresh capital catapults Sarvam AI to unicorn status with a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion.
Synergizing Scale and Sovereign AI
The partnership marks a pivotal moment for India's AI infrastructure. Sarvam AI specializes in building foundational models trained from scratch in India, designed specifically to handle the country's diverse languages, complex datasets, and massive scale. By stepping in as the lead strategic investor, HCLTech aims to marry its global enterprise transformation expertise with Sarvam's homegrown technology.
"Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem," said C Vijayakumar, CEO & Managing Director of HCLTech. "We are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions."
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Funding the Next Frontier
Founded by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, Sarvam plans to deploy the capital toward expanding its forward-deployed compute infrastructure and advancing research for its next-generation frontier models. The startup is specifically targeting agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use cases.
"We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India's scale is a very large opportunity. That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford," Pratyush Kumar stated, emphasizing the goal of allowing enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI.
Rapid Market Traction
Sarvam AI has moved quickly from the lab to population-scale deployments. The company's foundational models—such as the massive 105B reasoning model and the edge-optimised 30B model—are currently processing over 10 million API calls daily, tripling their usage in the last three months alone.
"The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI," added co-founder Vivek Raghavan. Backed by institutional trust and deep engineering talent, Sarvam AI is now heavily armed to diffuse foundational AI tech across small businesses, massive enterprises, and state governments alike.
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