Sarvam AI becomes India's newest unicorn with $234 million（約370億円） funding, backed by HCLTech as governments race to build sovereign AI capabilities independent of U.S. and Chinese providers.

What happened: Sarvam, a Bengaluru-based AI startup, raised $234 million（約370億円） at a $1.5 billion（約2400億円） valuation. HCLTech led the round with $150 million（約240億円）, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. The company is pursuing a total of $300 million（約480億円） for its Series B round. Sarvam has built open-source AI models in 30-billion- and 105-billion-parameters, designed for Indian languages, and deploys its technology across banking, insurance, government services, and defense.

Why it matters: India has emerged as a major AI market—OpenAI and Anthropic both cite it as their second-largest after the U.S.—yet few Indian startups have succeeded at building frontier AI models, hampered by high computing costs and limited capital access. Sarvam's funding reflects a broader push by countries and companies to develop sovereign AI capabilities amid concerns over access to advanced models and the infrastructure that powers them. Recent U.S. restrictions on Anthropic's latest models underscored how access to cutting-edge AI remains concentrated among overseas providers.

What to watch: Sarvam's platforms are already at scale—its conversational AI handles more than 2 million interactions daily, its inference system processes roughly 10 million API calls daily, and its speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio monthly. Its multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India's Ministry of Agriculture, and its agentic AI platform supports a fintech sales force of more than 350,000 people. The company plans to fund research into next-generation models focused on agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications.