HCL Technologies Ltd. has announced an investment of Rs 1,427.25 crore in Axonwise Private Limited, known as Sarvam AI, acquiring a 10.46 per cent stake in India’s full-stack sovereign AI company.
The investment involves the acquisition of 41,421 equity shares through 100 per cent cash consideration, and is expected to be completed within two weeks of signing.
The deal forms part of Sarvam’s larger fundraise, in which the Bengaluru-based company raised $234 million in the first close of its $300 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. HCLTech led the round as the lead strategic investor, committing $150 million, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners, with continued support from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
Sarvam, incorporated in July 2023, builds across the AI stack, spanning training and inference infrastructure, frontier model research, and a go-to-market motion covering enterprises, developers, and government. Its focus verticals include banking, insurance, government technology, and defence, with models spanning language, speech, vision, and documents, all trained from scratch in India. The company’s turnover grew sharply from nil in FY2024 to Rs 1.50 crore in FY2025, and Rs 45.10 crore in FY2026 as per unaudited financials.
The fresh capital will fund Sarvam’s continued research on training its next frontier model for agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use cases, along with access to compute at scale to expand its deployment across key industry verticals.
For HCLTech, the investment enables the development of industry and client-specific language models, the expansion of Sarvam’s multilingual AI capabilities across global markets, and the acceleration of sovereign AI adoption for governments, regulated industries, and enterprises seeking localized, secure, and compliant deployments.
Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder, 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.”
Commenting on the strategic rationale behind the investment, 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.”
Sarvam’s research has shipped at pace in recent months, with the release of foundational models trained entirely in India. Its Sarvam 105B model matches or outperforms larger reasoning models on knowledge, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks, while Sarvam 30B is optimised for the edge and runs on consumer hardware.
Sarvam Vision, built for handwriting and Indian-language records, is being used to digitise over 35 million pages ranging from insurance forms to legacy land records, while its speech models transcribe over half a million hours of audio each month in India’s complex linguistic settings.
“Our ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in India, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI. The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI,” said Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder of Sarvam.
“Sarvam is building and deploying India’s sovereign AI platform – serving 1.4 billion citizens, mission-critical sectors, and large enterprises. Pratyush and Vivek have brought together the rare combination of research depth, engineering talent, and institutional trust to meet India’s voice and agentic needs, and we are proud to partner with them,” said Pankaj Mitra, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners.
Sarvam partners with leading Indian enterprises including SBI Life, LIC, IDFC, Tata Capital and CRED, and continues to build India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform across research, models, infrastructure, and applications. The transaction does not fall within related party transactions, and no governmental or regulatory approvals are required for its completion.
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