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Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam has joined the unicorn club after raising $234 million in a funding round led by HCLTech, which valued the company at $1.5 billion. The investment underscores India's efforts to build domestic artificial intelligence capabilities amid rising concerns over dependence on foreign AI providers.
HCLTech is contributing $150 million as the lead strategic investor; other supporters include Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam said it intends to increase the total size of the Series B round to $300 million.
The new investment follows Sarvam's seed and Series A funding rounds, which raised $41 million two years ago. Since then, the company has released open-source AI models with 30-billion and 105-billion parameters.
While some startups are just developing AI model applications, Sarvam is developing a complete suite of business solutions, ranging from creating models to providing inference infrastructure and enterprise-level software. The AI products it has created are meant for Indian languages, banking, insurance, government, and defense applications.
Sarvam's operational data shows that the demand for their products is growing. The company has more than 2 million interactions every day with its conversational AI and around 10 million API calls every day with its inference AI.
Its speech models are translating more than 500,000 hours of speech a month; its document AI systems are being utilized to digitize over 35 million pages of paper records.
The company has also achieved big deployments in different industry segments. Sarvam reported that its multilingual voice agents enabled India's Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare to gather information from 17 million farmers. Also, a nationwide insurance campaign helped policyholders renew 45 million policies.
According to the company, a major player in the fintech space is leveraging Sarvam's agentic AI platform to support over 350,000 employees in the sales team.
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The new funding will power research in next-generation AI models, specifically in the areas of agentic systems, coding, and cybersecurity, and will scale up computing resources to cater to increasing demand.
Sarvam is an initiative started by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who were both part of the AI4Bharat team of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM).
The aim is to spread this technology in India and bring value to citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments in the country, Raghavan said. “With AI, we're in a great place to help them adopt and innovate.”
