Bhavish Aggarwal's AI startup Krutrim launches Android app; to unveil developer offerings

The startup, first unveiled in December 2023, became the country's first AI unicorn earlier this year after disclosing a $50 million financing at a $1 billion valuation. The funding round was led by Matrix Partners India, an early backer of Aggarwal's other ventures Ola Cabs and the IPO-bound Ola Electric.

Krutrim has pegged the mobile app as a chat assistant that can assist people as a writing tool to generate content such as blog posts, emails, messages, and social media posts among others. It can also provide answers to user's day to day queries, latest news and trends, and information on a wide variety of topics.

It's worth noting that users of Ola's flagship ride-hailing app have been able to access Krutrim within the app for sometime now. Aggarwal had also teased about a standalone Krutrim app in recent weeks. Moneycontrol has learnt that the iOS app is expected to be available soon.

We have reached out to Krutrim for a comment and will update once we hear back.

Krutrim's full-stack ambitions

Krutrim, which means "artificial" in Sanskrit, is focusing on building the entire AI computing stack. It will operate as a separate company within the Ola Group, similar to the IPO-bound Ola Electric and its cab business.

Krutrim plans to launch AI cloud services, called Krutrim Cloud, to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity later today.

As part of this offering, Krutrim will offer access to "state-of-the-art" GPU hardware that provides superior performance for intensive computing tasks like AI training, 3D rendering, and scientific simulations.

The platform will provide managed access to all the leading open source AI models, including its own, hosted on the company's cloud infrastructure to developers and enterprises seeking to create generative AI applications, Moneycontrol has learnt. It will also provide APIs with inferencing capabilities to help build generative AI applications.

Developers will be able to monitor their usage and performance metrics in real-time, manage their GPU resources easily and instantly scale them up or down depending on their project needs, Moneycontrol has learnt.

With this, the firm is likely aiming to compete with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, which have all seen strong revenue growth in the past couple of quarters due to growing demand from businesses and enterprises of all sizes.

In December, Ola chief had said that one of Krutrim's key differentiators will be providing services to developers on an "India-first cost structure"

Krutrim's AI chatbot now runs on the firm's own cloud infrastructure, Aggarwal recently said on X, the social media platform previously called Twitter. The startup also plans to offer "lots of Krutrim credits" to drive adoption for its cloud offerings among developers.

Mapping solutions

In addition to AI compute, Ola Maps intends to provide location intelligence services including mapping and location-based ones to developers, Moneycontrol has learnt.

As part of it, the company will offer navigation software development kits (SDKs) for iOS and Android; render rich, dynamic and interactive maps and provide relevant search suggestions based on geographical data. It will also enable developers to generate accurate and optimised routes for effective journey planning and fetch human-readable place names from geo-coordinates.

Ola had acquired GeoSpoc, a Pune-based provider of geospatial services, in October 2021. Ola Maps currently powers the mapping needs of the company's flagship ride-hailing app. The company had also announced plans to roll out Ola Maps to its electric two-wheelers as part of a software update in January.

Krutrim LLMs

Krutrim had first unveiled its family of multilingual LLMs in December. Trained by a team of computer scientists, based in Bengaluru and San Francisco, the company's LLM is available in two different sizes: a base model named Krutrim base, and a larger, more complex model called Krutrim Pro.

Krutrim Pro, expected to launch in Q4 FY24, 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 skills, 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 December launch event, 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.

Sarvam AI, which raised $41 million across seed and Series A financing from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures in December 2023, is another player in this space.

The startup recently released its first Hindi LLM in the OpenHathi series. The model is built on Meta AI's Llama2-7B architecture, and, according to Sarvam AI, delivers performance on par with GPT-3.5 for Indic languages.

Besides LLMs, Krutrim also harbours ambitions to build its own silicon and design its own chips.

The company said it 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 this year, leveraging the technology for sales, service, support, and other key processes.