Indian AI company Sarvam has appointed Sashikumar Sreedharan as its President and Chief Business Officer. Sreedharan joins from Google Cloud, where he most recently served as Managing Director for India. He will also join Sarvam’s board of directors.
Sarvam announced the appointment in a blog post on Monday, November 9. The hire comes as the Bengaluru company sharpens its focus on selling its AI stack to large enterprises and government institutions.
India should be a maker of the intelligence the world runs on. For me, joining Sarvam is a commitment to that opportunity. I look forward to working with the team and our customers to build products that become part of how industries and governments operate.
Sashikumar Sreedharan, President and Chief Business Officer, Sarvam
What Sreedharan will run at Sarvam
Sreedharan will lead Sarvam’s business across enterprises and government. He will also expand its work with digital native companies, developers and partners. The functions under him cover marketing, finance, forward deployed engineering, service delivery and commercial operations.
He brings about 35 years of experience building and leading technology businesses. Before Google Cloud, he led Microsoft India’s enterprise business as Managing Director for more than five years. His earlier roles include stints at IBM, Wipro and Happiest Minds.
A hire timed for the enterprise push
More than 100 enterprises and government institutions are already building with Sarvam’s full stack offering. The company says the next phase is about advancing its research, building products people around the world love, and operating at a much greater scale. Its stated belief is that every enterprise should own its AI, with the data, the models and the agents staying inside the enterprise.
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. Every enterprise should own its AI.
Sarvam, in its announcement blog post
From a research bet to a unicorn
Sarvam was founded in 2023 by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan. Both founders came from AI4Bharat at IIT Madras. The company builds foundation models, computing infrastructure and enterprise applications tuned for Indian languages and local use cases.
In April 2025 Sarvam became the first startup picked by the IndiaAI Mission to build an indigenous large language model. The mission gave it access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs for six months. Its planned sovereign model carries 70 billion parameters.
The company turned unicorn in June 2026. It raised $234 million in the first close of its Series B round at a $1.5 billion valuation. HCLTech led the round with Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
A product stack that keeps growing
The leadership change follows a busy run of product launches. Sarvam recently introduced Prism, a decision model built on its Sarvam 105B foundation model. It also shipped Sarvam Vision 2.1 for document processing in Indian languages, Saaras V4 for speech to text, and Bulbul V4 Flash for text to speech in October.
The hire says something plain about where Sarvam is headed. A research first company is now buying enterprise sales muscle at the top. Sreedharan spent about 35 years selling technology to large organisations. That is the experience Sarvam needs if its models are to turn into long term contracts.
