Sarvam Bets On A Google And Microsoft Veteran To Sell Sovereign AI

Sarvam AI has hired Sashikumar Sreedharan as its president and chief business officer, according to reports. Until recently, Sashikumar led Google Cloud’s business in India. Before that, he served as managing director of Microsoft India’s enterprise business, giving him experience selling to Indian CIOs on behalf of two of the three largest cloud providers. The appointment suggests that one of India’s best-funded foundation-model startups increasingly sees commercialization and enterprise distribution as a critical constraint.

Over the past year, Sarvam has shown it can train foundation models in India. It remains to be proven that enterprises and governments will pay for them at a scale that matches their valuation. Closing that gap will be Sashikumar’s key priority, and he arrives at a time when Sarvam is quietly redefining what it sells.

In June, Sarvam announced a $234 million first close of a planned $300 million Series B at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation. HCLTech committed $150 million as the lead strategic investor.

The revenue base is far smaller. Inc42 reported that Sarvam booked ₹45.1 crore, roughly $5 million, in FY26 revenue. That puts the valuation at nearly 300 times its latest annual revenue. It’s a crude comparison, but it still shows how much future commercialization investors have already priced in.

What Sarvam Sells Today

Sarvam unveiled Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B at the India AI Impact Summit in February and open-sourced both mixture-of-experts models under the Apache 2.0 license on March 6. As I noted at the time, much of the benchmark evidence behind them came from evaluations Sarvam designed and ran itself.

At the same time, Sarvam is chasing frontier scale. In July, it added Devendra Singh Chaplot, a Mistral AI founding team member and former xAI pre-training lead, as an advisor and outlined plans for a trillion-parameter model and a San Francisco office.