Sarvam AI in talks to raise $250-300 million from Nvidia, Accel, HCLTech

Foundational artificial intelligence (AI) startup Sarvam AI is in early talks to raise $250-300 million from US chipmaker Nvidia, Indian software services company HCLTech, and venture capital firm Accel, people aware of these discussions told ET. The round will value the company at about $1.2 billion, more than 10 times its last valuation of around $110 million, at which it raised in 2023, one of the persons said.

This will make it one of the first foundational model startups from India to enter the unicorn club amid rising investor interest in sovereign AI capabilities.

The company has so far raised $41.3 million across three rounds, with global venture funds such as Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures on its cap table. Sarvam is also a part of the IndiaAI Mission — under which it has accessed compute, funding, and grants from the central government in lieu of equity.


The fresh fundraising talks come as Sarvam ramps up commercial traction, announcing multiple partnerships with Indian and global firms to deploy its large language models (LLMs). It has tied up with companies such as Qualcomm, HMD, Bosch, and Nokia to integrate its models into enterprise and device-level use cases.

At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Sarvam unveiled its first homegrown foundation models — Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B — supporting 22 Indian languages. The startup also introduced a suite of products, including Sarvam Vision (OCR and multimodal capabilities), Sarvam Dub for translation and dubbing, and the Indus beta app for mobile and web. It also debuted Sarvam Kaze AI-powered smartglasses.

A senior industry executive pointed out that Nvidia’s investment in Sarvam could be seen as strategic. Sarvam has built its models on Nvidia’s stack, with the chipmaker supporting optimisation through its Nemotron libraries, including the NeMo Framework and NeMo-RL.

Sarvam is also part of Nvidia’s Nemotron Coalition, a global initiative led by CEO Jensen Huang to develop open-source foundation models. Backing Sarvam would allow Nvidia to deepen its footprint in India’s AI ecosystem and ensure local models are built on its full-stack platform.

HCLTech recently launched an AI Factory in collaboration with Nvidia, and backing Sarvam could enable it to deploy locally trained, production-ready AI models across its client base, particularly in India-focussed use cases.

Sarvam's cofounder Vivek Raghavan has said its monetisation strategy is centred on enterprise and government deployments. “We are primarily working with enterprises. Our approach is largely B2B. We’re also working with governments and different sectors,” Raghavan told ET earlier.

Queries sent to Sarvam, Accel, HCLTech, and Nvidia did not elicit a response at the time of publication.