BENGALURU: Artificial intelligence startup Sarvam has secured $234 million in the first tranche of its planned $300 million Series B funding round at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion.
HCLTech is leading the round with a $150 million investment, while Bessemer Venture Partners has joined the funding round alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
The company said the funds will be used to continue research on its next frontier model for agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity applications, and to expand access to computing infrastructure.
"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," said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam.
Sarvam develops artificial intelligence infrastructure and models for enterprises, developers and government agencies. It said its latest research includes the Sarvam 105B and Sarvam 30B models, both trained from scratch in India.
The company said its Sarvam Vision model is being used to digitise more than 35 million pages, while its speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio every month.
According to the company, its conversational platform handles more than 2 million interactions daily, with usage doubling over the past two months. Its inference platform processes 10 million API calls a day, with usage tripling in the last three months.
Sarvam said its multilingual voice platform was used to collect data from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. It added that a voice campaign for an insurance provider helped support policy renewals for 45 million policyholders.
"Our ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in India, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI," said Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam.
HCLTech Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director C Vijayakumar said the investment would combine Sarvam's AI research with HCLTech's enterprise capabilities.
"Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem," he said.