HCLTech’s Sarvam AI Bet: Is Patient Capital Finally Here?

Sovereign AI is back in the spotlight. 

India tried to position itself as a ‘neutral’ market through the India AI Impact Summit in February this year, but the landscape has completely changed since then. 

Tech giants of the world descended on New Delhi for the summit as Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood amid the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other Silicon Valley AI leaders. But everything points to a more insular AI world now. 

Since February, another war broke out in West Asia, denting India’s growth prospects severely, and coinciding with this foreign investors pulled out record amounts of capital from the market, with many pointing out that India’s subpar AI ecosystem is the chief factor. 

And then Anthropic suspended access to its latest AI models for non-US nationals after an intervention from the US government. All this has thrusted sovereign AI back into the conversation, after a relatively quiet few months on that front. 

And in this context, Sarvam’s unicorn round, led by an Indian IT giant rather than a global VC or private equity firm, is being seen as a turning point. Is it really?   

The Biggest Deal In Indian AI

Two years after Ola Krutrim entered the unicorn club (and long before its collapse), Sarvam raised $234 Mn at a valuation of $1.5 Bn to become the second AI unicorn in India. 

That the investment was led by HCLTech, which committed $150 Mn in the round, makes it more significant than any other investment in the eyes of many. Firstly, it is the largest capital infusion by an Indian IT services company into an AI startup, and could spur a new thesis among corporate funds in India.  

HCLTech’s investment is critical because it signals growing interest among established technology companies in shaping the startup’s AI ecosystem. This is what many AI founders have been calling for: a large corporate entity using its legacy profits to drive AI innovation. 

Many see this as similar to Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI in the early days, even though the scale of investment is completely different. Yet, the significance is no less.

Beyond capital, HCLTech brings enterprise relationships, engineering talent and global delivery capabilities that could help accelerate Sarvam’s adoption among large enterprises and government organisations. 

Brokerage firm Nomura defined the investment by HCLTech as the first of its kind by an Indian IT services company in a sovereign AI platform, while Morgan Stanley, in its note, mentioned that HCLTech’s investment in Sarvam will help it gain a strategic advantage around sovereign AI. 

This partnership will further give Sarvam access to large enterprise customers at a time when organisations are increasingly experimenting with AI deployments but remain cautious about data security and compliance. 

HCLTech CEO and managing director C Viajaykumar said that Sarvam’s AI research capabilities complement HCLTech’s enterprise expertise to create a full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments. He added that the investment marks a step towards building a trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem from India. 

Why Sarvam Matters

Founded in August 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kimar, Sarvam AI has steadily expanded its AI stack instead of focusing on a single category. 

The new funds will fuel Sarvam’s advance research on its next-generation frontier models, particularly for agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity use cases. A part of the capital will also be earmarked to secure large-scale computer infrastructure, as it expands deployments across enterprises and government organisations. 

Sarvam’s ambitions also extend beyond model development. It has invested time, engineering effort and funds in training and inference infrastructure, foundational model research, enterprise AI products and development platforms, making it one of the few Indian startups attempting to build an end-to-end AI ecosystem similar to what Anthropic and OpenAI have done at a fraction of the investment raised by those two AI leaders. 

With its recent product launches, Sarvam is pushing to gain more enterprise traction and this remains a fundamental weak point for Indian LLM makers competing with global giants, as we argued in a recent edition of the AI Shift. 

In its statement, Sarvam claimed that its conversational AI platform now handles more than 2 Mn interactions every day, with usage doubling over the last two months. Meanwhile, its inference platform processes around 1 Cr API calls daily, while developer adoption has tripled over the past three months. 

Sources told us earlier in June 2026 that conversational AI agents contribute nearly 80% of the company’s current revenue of around $12 Mn in annual revenue run rate (ARR) terms. 

Inc42 earlier reported that the startup is set to open its voice AI platform for public access after leaving it open only for select customers earlier. This rollout is expected to drive wider adoption of the voice AI platform, and could drive revenue momentum for Sarvam.

Domestic Capital Stepping Up?

Despite this shift in strategy, there’s little doubt that enterprise adoption will be a clear focus for Sarvam. If anything, the restrictions being imposed on Anthropic would have served as a wake up call for many companies looking to link their long-term AI strategy around US-based giants.  

Many believe that the only solution to this huge risk is building an Indian AI foundation that can compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google even as these companies continue to scale up in India. And accelerating this requires big infusion from domestic capital sources. 

Inc42 and Google’s Bharat AI Startups report projects that India’s AI market will hit $126 Bn by 2030, but our data also shows the country lags significantly behind the US and China. 

InMobi cofounder and CTO Mohit Saxena recently said at Inc42’s AI Summit that India’s AI ecosystem suffers from a severe lack of the long-term domestic capital necessary for deeptech development. While nations like China use constraints to drive foundational innovation, India risks remaining a mere consumer of global tech. 

Highlighting this critical funding deficit, Saxena noted: “To build a chip, it takes 20 years of commitment from VCs, founders, and the entire ecosystem. We [India] don’t have that kind of patience or capital.”

The same applies to foundational AI research and development, which involves years of refinement, training and iteration. At the moment, Sarvam AI is the only AI company in India that can afford to do this even as it scales up enterprise adoption gradually. 

The biggest risk is that, despite the example set by HCLTech’s investment, it may still be too late for Indian AI companies to compete with the scale of Silicon Valley giants. But that will not go away even if a few more such deals come through. For now, Sarvam can lay a few more bricks in the sovereign AI wall.   

Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam
Creatives By Varshita Srivastava

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