HCLTech acquires 10.46% stake in Sarvam AI for ₹1,427 crore at $1.5 billion valuation

In a first move of its kind, IT services company HCLTech Ltd is set to back India's large language model (LLM) space, agreeing to acquire a 10.46% stake in Sarvam AI for ₹1,427 (about $150 million) crore at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

The investment will be made through the acquisition of 41,421 equity shares of Sarvam AI. The transaction is expected to be completed within two weeks of signing, it said on Monday (June 15).

Sarvam AI’s Series B funding round has seen a first close of $234 million out of a planned $300 million raise, at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. HCLTech is the lead strategic investor in the round, alongside participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV Partners.

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Sarvam AI is an India-based sovereign AI company engaged in building frontier AI models across text and other modalities, along with AI products for enterprises, developers, and government applications. Its focus areas include banking, insurance, government technology, and defence, with models spanning language, speech, vision, and document processing trained from scratch in India.

The company reported turnover of ₹45.10 crore for FY 2026 (unaudited), compared with ₹1.50 crore in FY 2025 and no revenue in FY 2024. Sarvam AI was incorporated on July 14, 2023.

HCLTech stated that the investment will support Sarvam’s research and development in next-generation frontier models for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity use cases, as well as expansion of compute infrastructure to scale deployment across industry verticals.

The company added that the investment will help develop industry-specific language models and AI solutions for global clients, expand multilingual AI capabilities beyond India, and accelerate sovereign AI deployments for governments and regulated industries requiring localised and secure AI systems.

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Sarvam AI’s offerings include training and inference infrastructure, SaaS platforms, services-as-software models, smart devices, and wearable AI. Its models span language, speech, vision, and document processing, with applications across enterprise and public sector use cases.

Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam, said, "We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India's scale is a very large opportunity. That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford. Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI."

Sarvam's products are rapidly scaling, focused on the verticals where the stakes are highest: banking, insurance, gov tech, and defence. Sarvam’s conversational platform now handles over 2 million interactions a day, with usage doubling in the last two months. Sarvam’s agentic platform is scaling rapidly.

A leading fintech powers its 350,000-strong sales force with a sales enablement platform that is delivering demonstrable gains. Sarvam’s models are also being adopted by developers served on its inference platform in India, which processes 10 million API calls daily, with usage tripling in the last three months.

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Sarvam AI partners include SBI Life, LIC, IDFC, Tata Capital, and CRED. The company is headquartered in Bengaluru and operates across India. The transaction does not fall under related party transactions and does not require any governmental or regulatory approvals.

C Vijayakumar, CEO & Managing Director of HCLTech, said, "Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem. By bringing together Sarvam's research in AI models with HCLTech's global presence, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions."

Shares of HCL Technologies Ltd ended at ₹1,119.15, up by ₹9.95, or 0.90%, on the BSE.