HCLTech picks up 10.46% in Sarvam AI for ₹1,427.25 crore as a part of sovereign AI push

HCLTech is looking to invest $150 million or ₹1,427.25 crore in home-grown artificial intelligence startup Sarvam AI, marking an Indian IT major's first foray into the cap table of an Indian sovereign AI venture. The Noida-headquartered IT major is the lead strategic investor in Sarvam’s Series B round of $300 million, which values the AI startup at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion; HCLTech will pick up 41,421 equity shares for a 10.46% stake in Sarvam, in an all-cash deal, the IT major said in a statement. The transaction is expected to be completed in the next two weeks.

"Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step towards 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," C Vijayakumar, CEO & Managing Director of HCLTech, said in a statement. The investment is also aimed at accelerating HCLTech’s development and adoption of sovereign AI solutions for governments, regulated industries, enterprises, and compliant AI deployments.

The investment gains even more significance as it comes at a time when US-based AI major Anthropic has blocked the rest of the world from accessing its latest Fable 5 model, raising concern globally and renewing the push for sovereign AI models.

Sarvam’s latest funding round of $234 million is the first close of its larger $300 million Series B round, with Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investors such as Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also investing. The funds would be utilised to support Sarvam's research and development for training its next-gen frontier models for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity use cases, as well as access to compute at scale and deployment across key industry verticals, the statement said.

The Bengaluru-headquartered full-stack sovereign AI company is one of a handful of select firms that are a part of the India AI mission. According to disclosures, the three-year-old company clocked a revenue of ₹1.50 crore in FY25, and, according to unaudited financials for FY26, saw a revenue of ₹45.10 crore. It has leading Indian enterprises, including SBI Life, LIC, IDFC, Tata Capital and CRED as its adopters. "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,” said Sarvam’s co-founder Pratyush Kumar.

According to Sarvam, its Sarvam Vision, built for handwriting and the digitisation of Indian-language records, has been used to digitise over 35 million pages in use-cases such as insurance forms and land records. And the insights from its high-quality data from 17 million farmers collected on its platform are being used by the Ministry of Agriculture and for the welfare of farmers. At the India AI Impact Summit held earlier this year, Sarvam released two new models—30B and 105B—with a unified foundation built on a 262,000-token vocabulary that supports all 22 scheduled official Indian languages along with English, which is designed to deliver at scale and use compute more efficiently.

While the HCLTech investment marks a significant investment into the sovereign LLM space by an Indian IT firm, Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest IT company, is focussing on the infrastructure buildout. In October last year, TCS announced its plan to foray into the data centre space by incorporating a wholly owned subsidiary, HyperVault,, to establish multiple AI and sovereign data centres for providing Infrastructure and technology-enabled services. With TPG as its equity partner and an investment of nearly ₹18,000 crore ($2 billion) lined up, the sovereign AI data centre—with a capacity of up to 1GW—is a multi-phased, multi-year investment by the company.