Sarvam Becomes India's Newest AI Unicorn at $1.5B — HCLTech Leads $234M Series B Into Sovereign AI

Business Standard·medium signal

Sarvam raised $234M in the first close of a $300M Series B at a $1.5B valuation, led by HCLTech ($150M, taking a 10%+ stake) with Bessemer, Khosla, and Peak XV participating. The capital funds next-gen frontier models focused on agentic systems, coding, and cybersecurity plus large-scale compute for government and enterprise deployment. The notable structural signal: the round was led by an Indian IT-services giant rather than a global cloud platform, marking one of the largest domestic bets on sovereign AI and reinforcing the broader 2026 pattern of nation- and language-specific model labs raising at unicorn scale.