Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam is reportedly negotiating to raise up to $250 million in a new funding round led by Nvidia, Accel, and HCLTech.
According to a Moneycontrol report, this funding could value Sarvam at approximately $1.5 billion, representing a more than sevenfold increase in valuation in less than two years.
If successful, Sarvam could join the ranks of unicorns as one of the youngest startups to achieve this status. Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar in August 2023, the company is making significant strides in the tech landscape.
Previously, Krutrim AI, led by Bhavish Aggarwal, became the first homegrown AI startup to reach unicorn status with a $50 million funding round in January 2024.
Sarvam's last funding round raised $41 million in December 2023, in a Series A led by Lightspeed, with contributions from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
This latest fundraising effort aligns with Sarvam’s ambition to play a central role in India’s development of sovereign tech capabilities.
At the recent India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Sarvam introduced two large language models, Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B, both trained in India and tailored for local languages and business applications.
- Sarvam-30B: A lightweight model with a context length of up to 32,000 tokens, trained on nearly 16 trillion tokens.
- Sarvam-105B: A larger model supporting a context window of 128,000 tokens, designed for complex reasoning and workflows.
Sarvam asserts that its models perform competitively with global counterparts, particularly in reasoning and tasks involving Indian languages. The company has open-sourced its models to foster a domestic tech ecosystem.
However, early feedback from developers indicates challenges with adoption, including limited support tools and integration issues with popular frameworks.
In addition to its language models, Sarvam provides various platforms, including Saras and Bulbul for speech and voice applications, as well as enterprise solutions like Samvaad and Document Intelligence. The company has also launched a consumer app, Indus AI Chatbot.
Recently, Sarvam ventured into hardware with the introduction of “Kaze,” AI-powered smart glasses that process audio and visual inputs in real-time.
Sarvam is part of a growing group of Indian startups focused on foundational tech, alongside companies like Gnani.ai and the BharatGen consortium, reflecting a shift towards a distributed ecosystem rather than a single national champion.
