ETtech interview: AI is a capital game; our fundraise is large for India but quite small in the global context: Sarvam cofounders

Following Sarvam's $234 million fundraise, cofounders Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan stressed the critical role of capital in building artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. In an interview with ET, Kumar said AI is “absolutely a capital game” that helps attract top talent, while Raghavan noted that although the round is significant in the Indian context, it remains modest compared with the funding available to global AI players.

Looking ahead, Kumar said Sarvam — which counts HCLTech, Bessemer Venture Partners, Peak XV, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed among its backers — expects to be in a “constant cycle of building bigger models, raising more capital, and scaling up.” The company is also looking to set up an office in San Francisco to be able to hire from Silicon Valley.

Also read | Anthropic ban: Sarvam AI's Pratyush Kumar warns against reliance on foreign models


Edited excerpts:

Why did Sarvam take three years to raise its series B round of funding at a time when global capital is chasing AI?

Kumar: The first phase for Sarvam was about proving whether we can build sovereign AI ground up in India. We have proven that we can create these models ourselves. Now the cycle begins… more capital means more compute, better models, more deployment, and then further scale.

Will you be raising more funding soon?

Kumar: Hard to give a timeline but we will be in a constant cycle of building bigger models, raising more capital, and scaling up. You will see revenue uptake and our aspirations move up very quickly.

What was the thought process behind bringing in HCLTech as a strategic investor?

Raghavan: We are in an era of sovereign AI. We’ve seen what happened with Fable 5 and Mythos… when you’re running a sovereign AI company, it’s important to get investment that is Indian. That’s why we’ve collaborated with HCLTech for this funding. HCLTech has taken a stake, but Sarvam will continue to operate as an independent company. There is no question about that.

Is there also a go-to-market angle to this partnership?

Kumar: HCLTech has deep relationships with Fortune 500 companies and operates across many countries. We want to leverage that market access. This is an accelerant for Sarvam, not something that tethers the company. HCLTech is involved in data centres, physical AI, data creation and scaling, and even thinking about inferencing chips. This partnership is meant to unlock Sarvam to the next level.

We saw access to advanced models like Fable and Mythos being restricted. Does Sarvam's focus still remain on low-cost models or will we need to build comparable capabilities?

Raghavan: The capital we have raised is very large in the Indian context, but it is still quite small compared with the global context. We will have to continue being capital efficient in how we do things. At the same time, we also need significantly more capital to develop frontier capabilities. This fundraise takes us to the next orbit compared with where we were earlier. But we are still at the beginning of this race.

With what’s happened with Fable, do you believe sovereignty in AI is now a question of business continuity?

Kumar: Sovereignty is not only a patriotic question. Every company should think about its own control over AI. The Anthropic episode shows there is too much drama for companies to bet their quarterly and annual plans on. Enterprises will want to determine how they use AI. It is a natural tendency for countries to maintain their lead in critical technologies. That is why enterprises need to think of sovereign AI as a business-continuity question.

Where will the bulk of this capital raised be used?

Raghavan: One of the biggest factors in AI is the ability to get access to GPUs and hardware infrastructure. That will be an important use of the capital we are raising. We will use that infrastructure to train and finetune new models, and also to serve models at scale. On top of that, to make things useful, we have to build the software layer. So, all of these will be part of how the capital is deployed.

How much can be done through sovereign models today?

Raghavan: AI models are improving so rapidly that I would say 95% of what needs to be done can be done in a completely sovereign manner. There may be areas where we need to build larger models than we have today, and that is something we will focus on. From a business perspective, we believe we can build these sovereign solutions. Sovereign does not necessarily mean only country sovereign. It can also mean enterprise sovereign.

Will you focus on training models now or scaling up business?

Kumar: We do not want to train models just for the sake of it. We want a clear business plan for every model we train—what it will be used for and how it will be deployed. In coding and cybersecurity, there is an extreme necessity for sovereignty. The business case has become stronger there, and that will be a new variable in our calculus. We will train frontier-class models and build alternative stacks in India. But we will decide how much compute goes into training versus inference based on what the market is signalling.

Can you give us a sense of the scale of the business today?

Raghavan: We are scaling quite a lot. Over the last few months, we have more than tripled the number of people calling our APIs. Last month, we saw more than 300 million API calls. Similarly, in conversational AI, we are averaging more than 2 million calls a day with many different businesses across Indian languages. These numbers have doubled and tripled over the past few months, so the momentum is certainly there. The vast majority of this usage is from paying enterprises—more than 90%.

What’s your sense of the availability of AI talent in India today?

Kumar: There is no dearth of talent in India, but there is a dearth of experience. These are frontier technologies that only some people have had the chance to work on. That is why we are also opening an office in San Francisco and trying to attract people back. If you create strong companies like Sarvam, good talent will come, and that leads to more talent and more companies. This is absolutely a capital game. If you have the capital, you can play bigger games, and talent follows.