Sarvam AI Hires Ex-Google Cloud India Head as President and CBO

A veteran of Indian enterprise tech

Sreedharan spent more than a year as head of Google Cloud India. His career spans about 35 years, with stints at Microsoft India, IBM, Wipro and Happiest Minds Technologies, among others.

The hire signals that Sarvam wants to move beyond building indigenous AI models and turn its technology into a larger commercial business. The startup says more than 100 enterprises and government institutions already use its full-stack AI offering. "The next phase of Sarvam is about advancing our research, developing products loved by people around the world, and building a company that can operate at a much greater scale," the company said.

Models, funding and valuation

Founded in 2023 by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, Sarvam builds foundational models, computing infrastructure and enterprise applications aimed at Indian languages, data-security needs and local use cases.

It recently launched Prism, a decision model built on its Sarvam 105B foundation model. Instead of generating text token by token, Prism evaluates a context, a question and a predefined list of options in a single pass and returns calibrated probabilities for each choice. Recent releases also include Sarvam Vision 2.1, Saaras V4 for speech-to-text and, in October, the text-to-speech model Bulbul V4 Flash.

Earlier this year Sarvam raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, with HCLTech, Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners participating. It is reportedly in talks with Cognizant Technology Solutions to raise further funds for the round, targeting about $300 million at a valuation of roughly $3.5 billion to $4 billion.