NVIDIA, Accel, HCLTech in Talks to Back Sarvam AI at $1.5B

Sarvam AI, the Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup founded in 2023, is in advanced talks to raise up to $250 million from NVIDIA, Accel and HCLTech at a $1.5 billion valuation. The deal, if finalized, would make Sarvam one of India’s youngest unicorns and signal growing global confidence in India’s push for sovereign AI infrastructure.

NVIDIA, HCLTech and venture capital firm Accel are in talks to invest in Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI as part of a funding round of up to $250 million. The deal has not been finalized, and none of the parties have issued an official confirmation.

The round is expected to value the startup at approximately $1.5 billion, a more than sevenfold jump in valuation in under two years. If it closes, Sarvam would become one of the youngest startups to enter India’s unicorn club.

Sarvam AI was founded in August 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who were previously associated with AI4Bharat at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Raghavan brings experience building India’s digital public infrastructure, while Kumar serves as chief executive and leads the company’s product development, research and overall strategy.

In December 2023, the company closed a combined seed and Series A round of approximately $41 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. The prospective $250 million raise would mark a significant step up from that initial fundraise.

At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Sarvam 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.

In April 2025, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology selected Sarvam AI to develop an indigenous foundational model under the IndiaAI Mission, providing the company with access to government-supported computing infrastructure.

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Nvidia has an established relationship with Sarvam. The chipmaker’s DGX Spark platform runs sovereign AI models developed by Sarvam.ai, and Nvidia is also partnering with prominent venture capital firms including Accel India to identify and fund AI startups building solutions for India.

The potential investment would represent a major vote of confidence in India’s push for sovereign AI infrastructure. Sarvam competes in a small but growing cohort of Indian startups building foundational AI models. Alongside players like Gnani.ai and the BharatGen consortium, Sarvam reflects a broader shift toward a distributed, ecosystem-led approach to domestic AI development rather than reliance on a single national AI champion.

Disclaimer : This article is intended for informational purposes only, and is based on publicly available information. NervNow has not independently verified the claims.

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