Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal’s artificial intelligence startup, Krutrim, which was launched on December 15, 2023, has turned unicorn by raising $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion.
Thus, Krutrim not only becomes the first unicorn of 2024 but also the first AI startup in the country to have achieved that mark. Matrix partners India, an early backer of Aggarwal’s other ventures Ola Cabs and 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.
Aggarwal said in a statement that the 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 has consistently brought cutting-edge tech innovation to India at scale with Ola and Ola Electric. Now, with Krutrim, he’s poised to power the digital transformation of ‘Viksit Bharat.’ We’re incredibly privileged to deepen our partnership with Bhavish and Krutrim,” Avnish Bajaj, founder and MD of Matrix Partners India, said.
Krutrim, is a homegrown large language model (LLM) and generative AI platform, on the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Bard. It is trained on 2 trillion tokens or pieces of textual information, having the largest representation of Indian data.
Krutrim, which means ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, will come in two models — a base model and a Pro model. Just like ChatGPT, the current basic version of Krutrim is capable of answering people’s prompt or query. It can understand 22 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages, including Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Odia, Gujarati, and Malayalam. The company will also launch Krutrim Pro, which is a larger model for solving complex problems.
“Current AI models just can’t capture India’s culture, knowledge and aspirations, given our multicultural and multilingual context. We introduce Krutrim, a company with sole vision of creating India’s own AI for 1.4 billion Indians,” Aggarwal had said during the launch last month.
Apart from the foundational AI model for generative AI applications, the company is also working on AI computing stack in-house, which means creating an AI cloud infrastructure, as well as in-house development & manufacturing of chips optimised for AI compute. It has designed an architecture involving multiple chiplets, to power different AI infrastructure, models, and applications.
According to Ravi Jain, chief marketing officer at Ola, Krutrim will offer the right balance for performance and price and will be able to power most day-to-day applications.
He had said that all Ola group companies are already utilising Krutrim for a variety of internal tasks, including customer support, voice and chat, and customer sales calls.
In comparison with GPT-4, which is OpenAI’s large language model to power ChatGPT, Krutrim performs faster on Indian languages by generating responses in less time, using less compute, According to the company. In the English language, it outperforms Llama 2, which is Meta’s open source large language model.
Krutrim Si Designs was launched by Aggarwal in April 2023, with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti. Tenneti is one of the board members of ANI Technologies, which own Ola Cabs and Ola Electric. In October 2023, the company had secured $24 million in debt funding from Matrix Partners.
Prior to Krutrim, domestic startup, Sarvam had unveiled OpenHathi, which is the first Hindi large language model. Last year, it also raised $41 million from prominent investors such as Lightspeed Ventures, Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
