StopDownOpen the app

Funding · AI & Deep Tech

Sarvam AI raises $309 million to build India-specific AI models and infrastructure

By ·

Sarvam AI logo
Date
Company
Sarvam AI
What it does
full-stack sovereign AI platform
Kind
Funding
Amount
$309 million
Stage
Series B
Based in
Bengaluru
Founded
2023
Sector
AI & Deep Tech

What they do

Sarvam AI is a full-stack sovereign AI platform offering large language models, speech recognition, translation, document processing, and coding across 22…

What happened

The company raised $309 million in its Series B round, led by HCLTech, with an extension from Nvidia, taking its valuation to $1.51 billion

Why it matters

Sarvam's technology powers services like Aadhaar voice verification and SBI Life Insurance's customer engagement, and it handles millions of API calls and…

The details

  • Sarvam AI, founded in 2023, is building a full-stack sovereign AI platform tailored for India's needs, including large language models, speech recognition, translation, and document processing across 22 Indian languages.
  • The company raised $309 million in its Series B round, led by HCLTech, with an extension from Nvidia, taking its valuation to $1.51 billion.
  • Sarvam's technology powers services like Aadhaar voice verification and SBI Life Insurance's customer engagement, and it handles millions of API calls and document digitisation daily.
  • The company has access to about 2,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips and aims to scale this to 10,000, alongside a $1.5 billion HCLTech data centre partnership in Odisha.
  • Sarvam released Sarvam 30B and 105B under an open-source licence and is building a model with more than one trillion parameters.

The bigger picture

  • India's AI market is growing rapidly, with global players like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini gaining significant traction in the country.
  • Sarvam's strategy focuses on localisation and deployment, offering cloud, private-cloud, and on-premise deployment to cater to organisations needing control over sensitive data and local language support.
  • Sarvam's 105B model is priced at $0.80 per million tokens, significantly cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Mini and Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash.
  • India's AI market is expected to grow to about $17 billion by 2027, driven by enterprise technology investment and a growing base of AI professionals.

About the business

  • Sarvam AI provides a full-stack sovereign AI platform that includes large language models, speech recognition, translation, document processing, and coding across 22 Indian languages.
  • The company's technology powers services like Aadhaar voice verification and SBI Life Insurance's customer engagement, reaching millions of users.
  • Sarvam's models are trained from scratch in India, and its inference platform serves open-weight models from Indian infrastructure.
  • The company offers cloud, private-cloud, and on-premise deployment options, allowing organisations to maintain control over sensitive data and local language support.
  • Sarvam's revenue rose from Rs 1.5 crore in FY25 to Rs 45.1 crore in FY26.

What happens next

  • Sarvam aims to scale its infrastructure to 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips.
  • The company is building a model with more than one trillion parameters.
  • Sarvam plans to continue improving model performance and turning its localisation advantages into repeatable products and revenue.

The deal

Type
funding

Investors

  • HCLTech (lead) — A leading Indian IT services and consulting company.
  • Nvidia (participated) — A global leader in graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI computing.

Founders

  • Vivek Raghavan, co-founder and CEO
  • Pratyush Kumar, co-founder and CTO

About Sarvam AI

Product
Foundation models and agentic AI systems with voice capabilities and enterprise applications
Customers
Enterprise customers across finance, aviation, telecom and government sectors
How it makes money
SaaS and licensing model for AI models and enterprise AI applications
What sets it apart
India-built sovereign AI stack with focus on cost-effective deployment and localization

Read it as a card in the app

More on Sarvam AI

Everything on Sarvam AI →

Same day

All startup news on 24 August 2026 →