Sarvam announced on Monday that it has secured $234 million in fresh capital at a $1.5 billion valuation. The Bengaluru startup now ranks as India’s latest AI unicorn, as nations and firms push for greater oversight of key artificial intelligence systems and related hardware.

HCLTech, the IT arm of the HCL Group conglomerate, is providing $150 million of the total and serves as the lead strategic backer. Bessemer Venture Partners joined the round along with prior supporters Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam aims to complete its Series B at $300 million overall.

More than two years have passed since the company raised $41 million in seed and Series A financing. The new round follows the release of its open-source models sized at 30 billion and 105 billion parameters earlier this year.

The capital also signals a wider effort by governments and enterprises to create independent AI capabilities amid worries about reliance on foreign models and compute resources.

Sarvam is working to deliver an end-to-end AI platform that covers model creation, inference systems, and business applications. Its offerings target Indian languages and local needs, with deployments already underway in banking, insurance, public services, and defense.

The backing from HCLTech supplies a well-resourced partner to help bring the technology to market. The two firms plan to pair Sarvam’s models with HCLTech’s client network, engineering teams, and existing software to create tailored AI solutions.

India continues to grow as a major AI market worldwide. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have noted that the country ranks as their second-largest market behind the United States, fueled by its large developer community and rapid enterprise adoption.

Even with strong demand, India has generated few players capable of building leading-edge foundation models. Elevated compute expenses and tighter funding access have hindered local startups from matching U.S. and Chinese competitors, leaving Sarvam in a small cohort focused on domestic models.

Concerns around AI independence intensified recently after Anthropic restricted access to its newest models following a U.S. government directive to halt use by foreign nationals on national security grounds. The action underscored how advanced AI tools remain controlled by a limited set of overseas providers.

Sarvam will direct the new funds toward research on next-generation models for agentic workflows, coding tasks, and cybersecurity, while also broadening compute capacity to support wider industry rollouts.

The company’s conversational platform now manages over 2 million daily interactions, and its inference service handles about 10 million API requests each day. Speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio monthly, and document systems are digitizing over 35 million pages of records.

These capabilities are seeing large-scale use. Multilingual voice agents have gathered information from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. A national voice initiative for a major insurer aided renewals for 45 million policyholders.

In the enterprise space, a major fintech firm is applying the agentic platform to assist a sales team exceeding 350,000 members.

Founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar previously contributed to AI4Bharat, an Indian-language AI project at IIT Madras supported by Nandan Nilekani.

Raghavan stated that the goal is to spread the technology broadly across India to generate value for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and both state and central governments while helping them adopt and build upon AI tools.