“While HCLTech will invest around $150 million in Sarvam AI, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) will put in another $50 million as part of the deal,” one of the persons cited above said. “The remaining $100 million will come jointly from Nvidia, Prosperity7, Activate, Glade Brook and others, including existing backers.”
Sarvam AI is backed by investors such as Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners and others which are all expected to participate in the round on a pro rata basis, per sources. The round, which values Sarvam at $1.5 billion (around ₹14,250 crore) post-money, a 7X increase from 2023, is expected to close in the coming weeks.
Sarvam AI, HCLTech, Bessemer Venture Partners, Prosperity7, Glade Brook, Activate and Nvidia did not reply to Moneycontrol’s queries.
Moneycontrol had exclusively reported on March 24 Sarvam AI had begun talks to raise $250 million from HCLTech, NVIDIA, Accel and others in a fresh funding round which will be among the largest for an Indian AI startup in recent years.
A few days later, Moneycontrol was also first to report on April 1 that Accel had passed and Bessemer Venture Partners was actively engaging with the company to close a funding round. BVP’s US Partner, Sameer Dholakia, was leading discussions, the report had added.
AI threat to IT companies
If completed, the deal would mark a rare instance of a legacy Indian IT services firm backing a homegrown AI startup. India’s large IT companies have often faced criticism for being slow to make aggressive bets on frontier technologies such as AI, instead channeling capital toward buybacks and dividends over long-term R&D.
Over the past weeks, Indian IT stocks have also come under pressure amid growing concerns that advances in AI models from companies such as Anthropic and others could disrupt large parts of the traditional outsourcing business. Investors have increasingly questioned whether Indian IT firms are moving fast enough to adapt their business models and build meaningful AI-led capabilities as automation reshapes software development and back-office services.
Launches build momentum
Sarvam’s $300 million round is set to become the largest private market funding round for an Indian startup this year, while also marking the biggest capital infusion into a pure-play Indian AI startup to date.
Moneycontrol was also first to report Emergent, the AI vibe coding upstart, was finalizing a $250 million round from Creaegis and others.
Sarvam’s round is set to become the largest private market funding round for an Indian startup this year, while also marking the biggest capital infusion into a pure-play Indian AI startup to date.
This will be Sarvam’s first major cash infusion after about two-and-a-half years. It last raised $41 million in its Series A funding round, in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
While the interest in Sarvam has been high since then, investor conviction around the Bengaluru-based startup has strengthened just weeks after it launched two large language models (LLMs), a 30-billion-parameter model and a 105-billion-parameter model, both trained from scratch in India, at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February.
“(The models are) cheaper than something like a Gemini Flash, but outperforms it in many benchmarks,” Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar had said earlier this year. “Even with something like Gemini 2.5 Flash, which is a bigger and more expensive model, we find that the Indian language performance of this model is even better.”
India’s sovereign AI models
Sarvam is a prominent artificial intelligence (AI) player from India. Conversational AI firm Gnani.ai, and IIT-Bombay-led consortium’s sovereign AI initiative BharatGen are the others building foundational AI models in India as domestic startups and national initiatives stepped up efforts to build homegrown alternatives to global AI systems dominated by Big Tech.
Sarvam has also emerged as a key player in India’s sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) push. The IndiaAI Mission, backed by a Rs 10,000 crore (~$1 billion) fund to build India’s sovereign foundational model, has disbursed Rs 111 crore ($12 million) in GPU subsidies so far.
The biggest winner to date is Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, which bagged a record 4,096 NVIDIA H100 SXM GPUs via Yotta Data Services, receiving nearly ₹99 crore ($11 million) in subsidies.
Founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani-backed AI4Bharat, Sarvam develops a full-stack offering for Generative AI, ranging from research-led innovations in training custom AI models to an enterprise-grade platform for authoring and deployment.
