HDFC Bank invests in BharatGPT creator CoRover

HDFC Bank has invested in Bengaluru-based conversational AI startup CoRover marking the first such investment by a leading private bank in a generative AI model developer startup. The companies did not disclose the funding amount.

This comes after CoRover raised $4 million in Series A funding in September 2024 from investors such as Venture Catalysts, CanBank Venture Capital Fund, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park and IIIT Delhi’s iHub Anubhuti.

CoRover, the creator of BharatGPT sovereign large language model (LLM) serves over 1 billion users and 25,000 enterprises. It develops AI assistants such as chatbots, voicebots, videobots and telephony AI solutions. Its BharatGPT platform supports multiple Indian languages and dialects.


Arup Rakshit, Group Head Treasury at HDFC Bank, said the bank was drawn to CoRover’s focus on India’s linguistic diversity. “Development of BharatGPT, which enables exchange of information in multiple Indian languages for a diverse country like India, set apart CoRover for us,” he said.

Ankush Sabharwal, Founder and CEO of CoRover, said the partnership with HDFC Bank would help scale BharatGPT’s reach. “This partnership signals a shared commitment to building AI that is sovereign, secure, inclusive, and capable of scaling across India’s most critical sectors,” he said.

Founded in Bengaluru, CoRover has worked with organisations including Indian Railways, IRCTC, LIC, NPCI and SEBI. It recently launched BharatGPT Mini, which allows AI to run on low-end devices without internet connectivity, extending accessibility to rural and infrastructure-limited environments.