Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam is reportedly in talks to raise up to $250 million in a fresh funding round led by Nvidia, Accel, and HCLTech. According to a Moneycontrol report, the round could value the startup at about $1.5 billion, marking more than a sevenfold jump in its valuation in under two years.
Details
The AI startup last raised $41 million in December 2023 in a Series A round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam has unveiled two large language models, Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B, both trained from scratch in India and optimized for Indian languages and enterprise use cases. Sarvam-30B is positioned as a lightweight, cost-efficient model with a context length of up to 32,000 tokens, trained on nearly 16 trillion tokens. The larger Sarvam-105B supports a 128,000 token context window, enabling more complex reasoning and agent-like workflows.
Company Context
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar in August 2023, Sarvam operates in a small but growing sector of AI startups in India. The company offers various platforms like Saras, Bulbul (for speech and voice AI), while also offering enterprise platforms like Samvaad, Arya, Pravah, Document Intelligence, etc. It has also launched a consumer app named Indus AI Chatbot. The startup also recently expanded into hardware and ambient AI, unveiling “Kaze”, a pair of AI-powered smart glasses designed to process audio and visual inputs in real time.
Industry Context
The fundraise comes amid Sarvam’s bid to position itself at the center of India’s push to build sovereign AI capabilities. If the deal materializes, Sarvam could become one of the youngest startups to enter the unicorn club. The company’s open-source models and platforms aim to build a domestic AI ecosystem in India.
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Source: Inc42