Bhavish Aggarwal's AI startup Krutrim turns unicorn after raising $50 million

Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder and CEO Ola, Ola Electric (Illustration: Moneycontrol)

Krutrim, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup launched by Ola founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal, on January 26 announced that it has raised $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion, making it the first startup unicorn in the country in 2024.

This investment comes shortly after the six-month-old AI startup Sarvam AI raised $41 million across seed and Series A financing, signalling the rising investor interest in AI startups. Krutrim mentioned that it is the first AI unicorn in the country.

Matrix Partners India, an early backer of Aggarwal's other ventures Ola Cabs and the IPO-bound Ola Electric, led the funding round.

Krutrim plans to use the funds raised to expand its reach globally, drive innovation, and accelerate the company's goal to reshape the AI landscape.

In a statement, Aggarwal said that this funding round "not only validates the potential of Krutrim's innovative AI solutions but also underscores the confidence investors have in our ability to drive meaningful change out of India for the world,"

"Bhavish (Aggarwal) has consistently brought cutting edge tech innovation to India at scale with Ola and Ola Electric – and now excitingly with Krutrim to power the journey of ‘Viksit Bharat’ digitally" said Avnish Bajaj, founder and managing director, Matrix Partners India.

Krutrim, which means "artificial" in Sanskrit, aims to focus on building the entire AI computing stack. In December 2023, the company unveiled its first family of multilingual large language models (LLM), also called Krutrim.

Trained by a team of computer scientists, based in Bengaluru and San Francisco, the large language model will be available in two different sizes: a base model named Krutrim base, and a larger, more complex  model called Krutrim Pro.

Krutrim Pro, launching in Q4 FY 2024, will be multimodal in nature, which means it can understand and work with different formats, including text, audio, image, and video, at the same time. It will  also have larger knowledge, advanced problem-solving and task execution capabilities.

Krutrim claims that these models have been trained on 2 trillion tokens of data with the largest representation of Indian data to understand the nuances of Indian culture and languages, without disclosing any further details. It can understand 22 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages, the company said.

At the launch event in December 2023, Krutrim claimed that its AI models perform better than many open-source LLMs trained with similar amounts of data on a range of industry benchmarks. It also claimed to outperform OpenAI's GPT-4 in Indic language performance.

Krutrim will operate as a separate company within the Ola Group, similar to Ola Electric and its cab business. However, it does not use data from these businesses to train its AI models, Aggarwal said last month.

The AI model will also power a conversational AI assistant, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, that understands and speaks multiple Indian languages fluently.

The assistant will be available in beta version for consumers in February 2024. The AI models will also be available as an API for enterprises and developers, seeking to create AI applications. Aggarwal said last month that it will be available on an "India-first cost structure".

In addition, Krutrim plans to build its own silicon and design its own chips. The company is also working on AI infrastructure to develop indigenous data centers and eventually, server-computing, edge-computing and super-computers. The production is scheduled for mid 2024 for prototypes and a roll out production roadmap by the end of 2025.

Ola also plans to integrate Krutrim across its group companies by March 2024, leveraging the technology for sales, service, support, and other key processes.