Sarvam AI Eyes a $3 Billion Valuation: How Developers Can Use Its Indian-Language API

Sarvam AI is in talks to raise $250 to 300 million (about ₹2,800 crore) at a valuation of around $3 billion, according to an Economic Times report published on October 13, 2026. If the deal closes, the Bengaluru startup’s valuation would double in roughly four months, and Sarvam could become India’s highest-valued AI startup.

Funding news is fun to read, but most of our readers build websites and apps for a living. So this post covers the news briefly, then shows what Sarvam AI offers developers today and how to call its chat API from plain PHP and Laravel.

What the report says about Sarvam AI New Round

The new round is at the talks stage. Neither Sarvam nor any investor has confirmed it, and the final amount or valuation could change.

Don’t confuse it with the round Sarvam announced in June. On June 15, 2026, the company said it had raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B, at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation. HCLTech led that round with $150 million, Bessemer Venture Partners joined, and existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners stayed in. That round made Sarvam a unicorn.

So you’ll see two different “$300 million” headlines in 2026. The June one is done. The October one is still under negotiation.

Sarvam AI quick facts

Detail	Information
Founded	August 2023, Bengaluru
Founders	Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar (earlier with AI4Bharat, IIT Madras)
Government backing	Selected in April 2025 to build a foundational model under the IndiaAI Mission
Flagship model	Sarvam-105B (128K context window), announced February 18, 2026
Open weights	Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B released under Apache 2.0 in March 2026
June 2026 round	$234M first close of a $300M Series B at a $1.5B valuation
October 2026 report	In talks for $250 to 300M at about $3B valuation (unconfirmed)

Why this matters to Indian developers

Most popular AI APIs are built English-first. Many handle Hindi well enough, but results can get shaky in languages like Odia or Punjabi, or when users type Hindi in Roman script (“aap kaise ho”). Sarvam is building specifically for Indian languages.

For a freelancer or agency, that opens up projects you couldn’t easily do before: a Hindi or Tamil support chatbot for a local business, product descriptions translated into regional languages for a WooCommerce store, or voice replies for customers who would rather talk than type.

A bigger funding round usually means more compute, more models and a company that’s likely to be around for a while. That last part matters when you’re choosing an API to build a client project on.

What the Sarvam API offers

According to Sarvam’s model documentation, these are the main products available right now:

Model	What it does	Languages
Sarvam-105B	Chat completion, reasoning, agentic tasks	10 Indian + English
Sarvam-Translate	Text translation	22 Indian + English
Mayura	Translation that keeps context	10 Indian + English
Saaras v4	Speech to text	22 Indian + English
Bulbul v3	Text to speech	10 Indian + English
Sarvam Vision	OCR and document intelligence	22 Indian + English

There’s also document translation (PDF, Word, PowerPoint), dubbing and a managed voice agent platform. Sarvam’s docs list voice agent pricing from ₹3 per minute. Check the Credits and Rate Limits page in the dashboard for current API pricing before you quote a client.

How to call the Sarvam chat API from PHP

Step 1: Get your API key

Sign up at dashboard.sarvam.ai and create an API key. Store it in an environment variable called SARVAM_API_KEY, and never commit it to Git.

Step 2: Understand the request

The chat endpoint is POST https://api.sarvam.ai/v1/chat/completions. Sarvam’s quickstart sends the key in an api-subscription-key header. The body takes a model (for example sarvam-105b) and a messages array, the same shape you’ve seen in other chat APIs.

Here’s the cURL version from the official quickstart:

bash

curl -X POST https://api.sarvam.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "api-subscription-key: $SARVAM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "sarvam-105b", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of India?"}]}'

Step 3: Plain PHP with cURL

This works on any PHP 7.4+ host, including the shared hosting most small Indian businesses use.

php

<?php

$apiKey = 'SARVAM_API_KEY'; // paste your key here for testing only

$payload = [
    'model'    => 'sarvam-105b',
   'messages' => [
    ['role' => 'system', 'content' => 'You are a helpful support assistant for a Delhi bakery. We deliver 7 days a week, 9am to 9pm. Reply in Hindi.'],
    ['role' => 'user',   'content' => 'Kya aap Sunday ko delivery karte ho?'],
],
];

$ch = curl_init('https://api.sarvam.ai/v1/chat/completions');
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_POST           => true,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 60,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => [
        'Content-Type: application/json',
        'api-subscription-key: ' . $apiKey,
        'Authorization: Bearer ' . $apiKey,
    ],
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS     => json_encode($payload),
]);

$response  = curl_exec($ch);
$status    = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
$curlError = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$data = json_decode($response, true);

if ($status === 200) {
    echo $data['choices'][0]['message']['content'];
} else {
    echo 'Error ' . $status . ': ' . ($data['error']['message'] ?? 'Unknown error');
}

The reply text is in choices[0].message.content, and token counts are in usage. If you get a 429, you’ve hit your quota or rate limit, so add a retry with a short delay.

Output:

Step 4: The Laravel version

In Laravel, put the key in .env as SARVAM_API_KEY=sk_..., add it to config/services.php, and use the HTTP client:

php

// config/services.php
'sarvam' => [
    'key' => env('SARVAM_API_KEY'),
],

php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;

$response = Http::withHeaders([
        'api-subscription-key' => config('services.sarvam.key'),
    ])
    ->timeout(60)
    ->post('https://api.sarvam.ai/v1/chat/completions', [
        'model'    => 'sarvam-105b',
        'messages' => [
            ['role' => 'user', 'content' => 'Mera order kab tak aayega?'],
        ],
    ]);

if ($response->successful()) {
    return $response->json('choices.0.message.content');
}

logger()->error('Sarvam API error', $response->json());

Wrap this in a service class if you plan to reuse it across controllers, and queue long requests so your users aren’t stuck waiting on a page load.

Ideas for client projects

1. For a WooCommerce store, run product titles and descriptions through Sarvam-Translate and save them as Hindi or Marathi versions with a multilingual plugin.
2. For a WhatsApp or website support bot, use Sarvam-105B with a system prompt containing the business’s FAQs, store hours and delivery areas.
3. For clinics, coaching centres or shops whose customers prefer listening, convert answers to audio with Bulbul.
4. For paperwork, use Sarvam Vision to pull text from invoices or forms written in regional languages.

Test output quality in every language your client needs before you promise anything. A model that’s strong in Hindi may be weaker in another language, so read real responses with a native speaker.

Key Takeaways

• Sarvam AI is reportedly in talks to raise $250 to 300 million at about a $3 billion valuation (Economic Times, October 13, 2026). Nothing is confirmed yet.
• This is separate from the $300 million Series B Sarvam announced on June 15, 2026, at a $1.5 billion valuation.
• Sarvam’s API covers chat, translation, speech to text, text to speech and document OCR, with a focus on Indian languages.
• You can call the chat API from PHP or Laravel with a single POST request and an api-subscription-key header.
• Check current pricing and language support in the official docs before building a client project on it.

FAQs

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