Krutrim, the AI startup founded by Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, has raised USD 50 million in a funding round led by Matrix Partners India. Aggarwal said the funding was at a valuation of over USD 1 billion. This makes it perhaps India’s first unicorn in the pure AI space. The funds would be deployed to drive innovation and expand its footprint globally. Krutrim, Sanskrit for artificial, will have an identity separate from Ola’s mobility and EV businesses.
“India has to build its own AI, and at Krutrim we are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack,” Aggarwal, the founder of Krutrim and cab aggregator Ola said. The company was incorporated as Krutrim SI Designs in April last year with teams based in Bengaluru and San Francisco.
The beta version of Krutrim will be available for consumers from February. Additionally, it will also be available as an API (application programming interface) for enterprises and developers, seeking to create AI applications.
Aggarwal recently launched “Made for India” ChatGPT equivalent that he said will support 10 Indian languages. Several ventures in India are working on similar initiatives, based partly on the government’s Bhashini mission that is building an Indian language database which can be used to train AI models.
Aggarwal said models trained on Indic languages have performed better than open-source LLMs trained with similar amounts of data on a suite of industry standard benchmarks including MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding), HellaSwag, a dataset for studying common sense inference, PIQA, dataset for common sense reasoning, among others.
