Ola Founder's AI Startup Krutrim Achieves $1 Billion Valuation

India now boasts its own large language model (LLM) contender with Krutrim, an AI startup established by Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of Ola Electric and Ola Cabs. Recently, the startup attained unicorn status, having raised $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion. Aggarwal announced this milestone on January 26, marking Krutrim as the country's first AI unicorn.

The announcement follows closely behind Savaram AI's recent $41 million fundraising. Savaram AI is a six-month-old startup. Notably, Matrix Partners India, an early supporter of both Ola Cabs and the soon-to-be public Ola Electric, has invested in Krutrim. Krutrim’s LLM models are uniquely specialized in Indic languages.

Krutrim plans to use the funds to expand its global reach and accelerate AI development. Bhavish Aggarwal remarked, "This not only validates the potential of Krutrim's innovative AI solutions but also underscores the investors' confidence in our ability to effect meaningful change globally, starting from India.”

"Bhavish Aggarwal has consistently introduced cutting-edge tech innovations to India at a large scale with Ola and Ola Electric, and now, excitingly, with Krutrim, to digitally empower the concept of 'Viksit Bharat' (Developed India)," commented Avnish Bajaj, founder and managing director of Matrix Partners India.

Named after the Sanskrit word for 'artificial', Krutrim aims to develop not just an LLM, but also its own AI infrastructure, ranging from silicon to data centre stacks. The startup first showcased its capabilities in December 2023.

Krutrim, trained on over 2 trillion tokens, is already operational. Its advanced model, Krutrim Pro, a larger multi-modal model, is set for release later this quarter. Aggarwal has asserted that Krutrim Pro outperforms GPT-4 in several Indic languages, including Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, and Tamil.

Furthermore, Krutrim even surpasses Meta's Llma 2 model in English-Indic language applications.

To deploy these models effectively and sustainably, Krutrim is developing a novel chipset architecture and a system-in-package solution tailored for edge and automotive products. The company aims to create India's first supercomputer, with all silicon layout and fabrication processes carried out domestically.

Sambit Sahu, a former Qualcomm and Intel executive, joined Ola earlier in 2023 to spearhead this initiative. Until recently, Sahu served as the engineering lead at Qualcomm in India, holding the vice president title. The chipset project is scheduled to undergo tape out later this year, with production samples expected by the end of 2025.