Sarvam AI

AI/ML · Foundation Models · India

Funding

Sarvam AI raises $75M as Nvidia makes its first Indian startup bet

The chipmaker's equity stake signals rising confidence in homegrown AI models built specifically for Indian languages.

• Nvidia led a roughly $74-75 million extension of Sarvam AI's Series B round, marking the chipmaker's first-ever equity investment in an Indian startup, per regulatory filings.
• Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, builds foundation models, inference infrastructure and enterprise AI products tailored to Indian languages and use cases.
• Nvidia put in about $25 million for a 1.66% stake and Glade Brook Capital $20 million for 1.33%, with Gaja Capital and IndiGo Ventures rounding out the tranche at a roughly $1.51 billion post-money valuation.
• The tranche extends Sarvam's Series B after a June first close of $234 million led by HCLTech and Bessemer Venture Partners, which pushed the company past a $1 billion valuation as India's fifth unicorn of the year.
• The capital arrives as Sarvam plans to train a trillion-plus-parameter model on a cluster of 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, targeting coding, cybersecurity and scientific applications.
• Nvidia taking an equity stake rather than just supplying chips shows the company is betting on sovereign AI stacks emerging outside the US and China, not merely selling hardware into them.