companies

Sarvam AI

Bengaluru AI lab building sovereign, multilingual models and voice APIs tuned to India's languages, from Hindi and Tamil to Bhojpuri.

Sarvam AI was founded in August 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, two engineers who had spent years building public AI infrastructure for India — Raghavan as chief biometric architect at UIDAI, where he helped design Aadhaar and UPI, and Kumar as co-founder of AI4Bharat, the open Indic-language research group at IIT Madras. The pair set out to build what they call 'sovereign AI': language models, speech systems and translation tools trained specifically for India's languages and accents rather than adapted afterward from English-first models. The company raised roughly $41 million in a combined seed and Series A round in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures participating. In June 2026, Sarvam became one of India's newest AI unicorns after closing $234 million of a planned $300 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, with HCLTech investing $150 million as lead strategic backer and Bessemer Venture Partners also joining. Sarvam's stack now spans speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation and general-purpose language models, sold through a pay-per-use API and increasingly deployed inside Indian government and enterprise systems that need to work in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada and a dozen other languages rather than English alone.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Bengaluru, India

Sector

lab