Sarvam AI in Talks for $250M Round at $1.5B Valuation With NVIDIA, Accel, and HCLTech

Sarvam AI, the Bengaluru-based company building foundation models for Indian languages, is in advanced talks to raise between $200 million and $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to Moneycontrol, which cited five people familiar with the discussions. The round would include NVIDIA, venture capital firm Accel, and Indian IT services giant HCLTech.

If completed, the deal would represent a sevenfold increase in Sarvam’s valuation in roughly two years and become the largest private market funding round for an Indian startup in 2026, per Moneycontrol. It would also be the biggest capital infusion into a pure-play Indian AI company to date.

The Investor Mix

Each investor in the reported round serves a different strategic function. NVIDIA’s participation is a direct hardware alignment: Sarvam already relies on NVIDIA chips and secured 4,096 NVIDIA H100 SXM GPUs through Yotta Data Services as part of the Indian government’s IndiaAI Mission, according to Storyboard18.

HCLTech’s involvement would mark the first time in recent years that a major Indian IT services firm has acted as a strategic investor in an AI startup, per Moneycontrol. The company could leverage Sarvam’s models to deploy AI solutions across its enterprise client base. Accel’s role is expected to support Sarvam’s expansion beyond India.

Sarvam, NVIDIA, and Accel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A HCLTech spokesperson told Moneycontrol that the company does not comment on speculation. Negotiations remain ongoing and the final round size may change, sources told Moneycontrol.

India’s Sovereign AI Push

Sarvam last raised $41 million in a Series A round in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures, Moneycontrol reported.

Investor conviction has strengthened since Sarvam launched two large language models at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February: a 30-billion-parameter model and a 105-billion-parameter model, both trained from scratch in India. Co-founder Pratyush Kumar said the models are “cheaper than something like a Gemini Flash, but outperforms it in many benchmarks,” and that “even with something like Gemini 2.5 Flash, which is a bigger and more expensive model, we find that the Indian language performance of this model is even better,” according to Moneycontrol.

The company has been a major beneficiary of India’s IndiaAI Mission, a government initiative backed by a ₹10,000 crore (approximately $1 billion) fund aimed at building sovereign foundational models. Sarvam has received nearly ₹99 crore (approximately $11 million) in GPU subsidies from the program, per Storyboard18.

Context

Founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both previously at the AI4Bharat initiative backed by Nandan Nilekani, Sarvam builds a full-stack generative AI platform spanning model development to enterprise deployment, Storyboard18 reported. Sarvam is one of several Indian entities building foundational models alongside conversational AI firm Gnani.ai and the IIT-Bombay-led BharatGen consortium, per Moneycontrol.

The round arrives during a period of record-breaking AI funding globally, highlighting the growing ambitions of national AI champions outside the US frontier lab ecosystem.