Ola founder’s AI startup hits unicorn status with $50m round

Krutrim founder Bhavish Aggarwal / Photo credit: Ola

Krutrim, an Indian AI company founded by Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, has secured US$50 million in its first funding round, led by investors such as Matrix Partners India. The investment brought Krutrim’s valuation to US$1 billion.

This makes Krutrim not only the first AI unicorn from India, but also the fastest local startup to reach this status, it said in a statement.

The company’s goal is to develop the complete AI computing stack, including large language models (LLMs), conversational AI, and AI infrastructure. Krutrim said that its base LLM, which was launched last month, can process and produce content in multiple Indian languages, and that it performs better than other global models on various benchmarks.

“India has to build its own AI,” Aggarwal said. “We are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack.”

The company plans to release its conversational AI assistant and its API for developers and enterprises in February. It also aims to launch a pro version of its LLM – which will have multimodal and larger knowledge capabilities – in the fourth quarter of this year.

To further support its AI ambitions, the company is building infrastructure to develop local data centers and planning to expand it to accommodate server computing, edge computing, and supercomputers.

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