Indian artificial intelligence firm Sarvam AI said on Monday it had raised US$234 million as part of a targeted broader funding round as it looks to roll out models that can challenge Chinese and US rivals.

The AI start-up made waves in the world's most populous country this year when it released two large language models that it said were trained from scratch in India.

Its models are designed to work across 22 Indian languages and are accessible through voice commands, which it hopes will give it a leg-up against global competitors.

Sarvam AI said in a statement it had raised US$234 million "in the first close of its US$300 million Series B", giving it a valuation of US$1.5 billion.

Indian IT giant HCLTech and venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners invested in the current round, which also included existing investors such as Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.

"We are going to push hard across every layer of the company, but the thing that excites me most right now is our shot at building frontier-class AI systems from India," co-founder Pratyush Kumar said in a statement.

"Country of India scale cannot rent intelligence. We have to build it ourselves," he said. (AFP)



Edited by Cecil Wong