HCLTech Leads ₹1,427-crore Investment in SarvamAI, Buying 10.46% Stake in Landmark Sovereign AI Bet; IT Giant’s Shares Surge over 3%

Mumbai, June 16: HCL Technologies (NSE: HCLTech) has made one of the most significant corporate investments yet in India’s homegrown AI ecosystem, announcing on Monday evening, that it will invest in Axonwise Pvt Ltd, the parent company of Sarvam AI. In a statement to the BSE and NSE, HCLTech confirmed a total investment of ₹1,427.25 crore, acquiring 41,421 equity shares for a 10.46% stake in the Bengaluru-based company. The transaction, structured as 100% cash consideration, is expected to complete within two weeks of signing and requires no governmental or regulatory approvals. 

The investment is part of a broader fundraise: Sarvam announced it has raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion, with HCLTech as the lead strategic investor contributing $150 million. Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, alongside continued backing from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. 

HCLTech’s disclosure describes Sarvam as India’s full-stack sovereign AI company, building frontier models across text and other modalities with focus verticals spanning banking, insurance, government technology, and defence. Notably, Sarvam’s revenue trajectory has been steep: nil in FY2024, ₹1.50 crores in FY2025, and ₹45.10 crores in FY2026 on an unaudited basis. The company’s client roster already includes major Indian enterprises such as SBI Life, LIC, IDFC, Tata Capital, and CRED. 

Also Read: From Nokia Brick Phones to Frontier AI: How Sarvam is Rewriting India’s AI Playbook 

According to the disclosure, the investment will fund Sarvam’s continued research on next-generation frontier models for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity, while giving it access to compute at scale. HCLTech, in turn, said the partnership lets it develop industry-specific language models for its global client base, leverage Sarvam’s multilingual capabilities beyond India, and accelerate sovereign AI adoption among governments and regulated industries. HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar called it “a significant step toward building India’s trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem,” while Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar framed it as innovation toward “a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI.” 

The statement also detailed Sarvam’s operational scale: its conversational platform handles over 2 million interactions daily, with usage doubling in two months; its inference platform processes 10 million API calls daily, tripling in three months; and its vision models have digitised over 35 million pages of handwritten and Indian-language records.

For Sarvam, India’s push toward AI self-reliance crystallised at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, where the Bengaluru-based startup unveiled its latest suite of large language models — 30- and 105-billion parameter LLMs trained from scratch on trillions of tokens across multiple Indian languages, alongside text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and document-vision models. The company positioned this as proof that it could build something locally that genuinely competes, with Bloomberg describing the effort in similar terms, and Sarvam itself framing its models as more aligned with India’s languages and cultures than products like ChatGPT and Claude.

That deliberate, India-first strategy has been backed by substantial government support — Sarvam was selected under the IndiaAI Mission’s Innovation Centre pillar for compute and financial assistance worth roughly ₹246.72 crore — and the company has used that support to push AI into parts of India most frontier labs aren’t designing for. At the summit, Sarvam demonstrated AI assistants running on basic feature phones without internet access, a deliberate bet on reach over raw scale. 

The message behind it was clear: Sarvam’s ambition isn’t to outbuild Anthropic or OpenAI on parameter count, but to serve “a billion Indians” through small, efficient, edge-deployable models built for the country’s linguistic diversity and connectivity realities. The HCLTech investment now gives that strategy fresh fuel, with fresh capital aimed squarely at the next generation of agentic, coding, and cybersecurity-focused models built specifically for India’s enterprise and government needs.

Stock Market Reaction 

HCLTech shares were trading sharply higher on the back of the news, up 3.27% to ₹1,155.90 intraday, after opening at ₹1,141.00 and touching a high of ₹1,157.00 against a previous close of ₹1,119.30. The stock has seen strong buying interest through the morning session, holding well above its VWAP of ₹1,149.67 with sell-side quantity at the top of the order book outweighing buy-side. 

Weekly Trend 

On a weekly basis, the stock has staged a sharp recovery after a steady decline through the first half of the week, falling from around ₹1,148 on June 9 to a low near ₹1,110 by June 12. Since then, shares have rebounded strongly, climbing back above ₹1,120 by June 15 before today’s investment-driven rally pushed the stock decisively past its prior week’s highs. The current intraday gain of over 3% marks the strongest single-session move in the past week, effectively erasing the entire mid-week dip. 

Source

•  https://www.nseindia.com/get-quote/equity/HCLTECH/HCL-Technologies-Limited