HCLTech leads Sarvam's USD $150 million Series B close
Tue, 16th Jun 2026 (Today)
HCLTech has led the first close of Sarvam's Series B funding round with a USD $150 million investment. The round raised USD $234 million at a post-money valuation of USD $1.5 billion.
The investment makes HCLTech the lead strategic investor in the Indian artificial intelligence company, which focuses on sovereign AI systems. Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, while Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners continued their backing.
The funding marks the first close of a USD $300 million Series B round. Sarvam will use the money for research on its next frontier model for agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications, and to secure large-scale compute infrastructure as it expands deployments across key sectors.
The deal comes as demand grows among governments and large organisations for greater control over where AI models, infrastructure, and data are built and managed. Sarvam describes itself as a full-stack sovereign AI company, with work spanning training and inference infrastructure, model research, and products for enterprises, developers, and government.
Investors are backing a domestic AI supplier as India seeks to build more of its own technology base in strategic sectors. According to Sarvam, its products are already used in banking, insurance, government technology, and defence.
Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam, outlined the company's approach to building AI products for local conditions.
"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. Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI," said Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam.
Research and rollout
Sarvam has released foundational models trained from scratch in India in recent months. It said Sarvam 105B matches or exceeds larger reasoning models on knowledge, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks, while Sarvam 30B is designed to run on consumer hardware.
The company also pointed to commercial uptake of its products. Sarvam Vision is being used to digitise more than 35 million pages, including insurance forms and land records, while its speech models transcribe more than half a million hours of audio each month.
Its conversational platform handles more than 2 million interactions a day, with usage doubling in the past two months. Sarvam added that its inference platform in India processes 10 million API calls a day, with usage tripling in the past three months.
One fintech client uses its agentic platform to support a 350,000-strong sales force. Sarvam also said multilingual voice agents on its platform collected data from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer's Welfare, while a voice campaign for a large insurer supported policy renewals for 45 million policyholders.
Strategic investor
For HCLTech, the transaction adds a direct stake in a domestic AI developer at a time when technology services companies are seeking a stronger role in the market for AI tools and platforms. HCLTech said the combination of Sarvam's model research and its enterprise relationships and engineering resources would help create an end-to-end sovereign AI platform for corporate and public sector users.
"Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem. By bringing together Sarvam's research in AI models with HCLTech's global presence, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions," said C Vijayakumar, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, HCLTech.
Sarvam's other investors also described the round as a bet on India's own AI infrastructure and products. Bessemer Venture Partners said the company was serving large enterprises, public sector applications, and national-scale use cases.
"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. The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI," said Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder of Sarvam.
"Sarvam is building and deploying India's sovereign AI platform - serving 1.4 billion citizens, mission-critical sectors, and large enterprises. Pratyush and Vivek have brought together the rare combination of research depth, engineering talent, and institutional trust to meet India's voice and agentic needs, and we are proud to partner with them," said Pankaj Mitra, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners.