Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Indian start-up Sarvam, which builds indigenous foundation AI models, is in talks to raise $200-250 million in a fresh round from global tech titan Nvidia, venture capital firm Accel and information technology (IT) major HCLTech as AI takes centre stage, five people aware of the developments told Moneycontrol.
Raising funds from strategic investors is understandable as Sarvam already uses Nvidia chips. Bringing on HCLTech as an investor will likely help the IT major to tap into Sarvam’s AI capabilities and deploy AI solutions at scale.
A large VC fund like Accel will help Sarvam access markets outside India apart from providing it capital to scale.
Sarvam is commanding a valuation of around $1.5 billion, growing over 7x in just two years, these sources added.
“Negotiations are still underway and it is possible the final round size changes a bit as more investors continue to engage with Sarvam and express willingness to fund the company,” one of the persons cited above said.
Sarvam, Nvidia and Accel did not immediately respond to Moneycontrol’s request for comments. A spokesperson for HCLTech said: “as a policy we don’t comment on speculation.”
If talks materialise, it would mark the first time in recent years that an Indian IT major has stepped in as a strategic investor in an AI start-up — potentially easing concerns about their pace on AI.
Launches build momentum
Sarvam’s round is set to become the largest private market funding round for an Indian start-up this year, while also marking the biggest capital infusion into a pure-play Indian AI start-up 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 has been high since then, investor conviction around the Bengaluru-based start-up 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 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 start-ups and national initiatives stepped up efforts to build home-grown alternatives to global AI systems dominated by big tech.
Lightspeed-backed Sarvam AI 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 Rs 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.
If talks materialise, it would mark the first time in recent years that an Indian IT major has stepped in as a strategic investor in an AI start-up — potentially easing concerns about their pace on AI.
