Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal takes the ‘made for India’ approach with Krutrim AI model

Bhavish Aggarwal

Krutrim Si Designs, the artificial intelligence (AI) venture of Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal, has unveiled Krutrim, its first family of multilingual AI models,  thereby joining the increasingly competitive AI model race.

Krutrim, meaning "artificial" in Sanskrit, will come in two sizes: a base model named Krutrim trained on 2 trillion tokens and unique datasets, and a larger, more complex model called Krutrim Pro, launching early next year for advanced problem-solving and task execution capabilities.

During the launch event, Aggarwal previewed a AI chatbot that is powered by Krutrim that functions similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. It can understand 22 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages. The Krutrim team is based across India and Bay Area (US).

Krutrim Si Designs was launched in April 2023. It was setup by Aggarwal with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti, who is one of the board members of ANI Technologies Ltd, which owns Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.

Aggarwal had previously said that Krutrim will be an AI company made for Indian customers using the country's data resources.

This launch comes on heels of Indian startup Sarvam unveiling OpenHathi, the first Hindi large language model. The startup recently announced a $41 million fundraise from prominent investors such as Lightspeed Ventures, Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.

Tech giant Google also unveiled Gemini, the company's newest and the most advanced AI model earlier this month.