krutrim ai unicorn: Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s Krutrim AI turns unicorn with $50 million funding from Matrix, others

The AI firm, founded by Ola Electric’s Bhavish Aggarwal, raised the capital from investors led by venture capital fund Matrix Partners India. Unicorns are privately-held startups valued at $1 billion or more.

Krutrim did not provide further details of the funding round. Last October, the firm had raised $24 million in debt from Matrix Partners, which is also an investor in Aggarwal’s ride-hailing company Ola and electric two-wheeler maker Ola Electric.

“India has to build its own AI, and at Krutrim, we are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack,” Aggarwal said in a statement.
Last December, Krutrim had announced its large language model (LLM) in two formats. While the company opened registrations for the base format, Krutrim, it is expected to make a public launch this month, Aggarwal said at the time. The more sophisticated Krutrim Pro format featuring vision, speech, and task execution capabilities will be available later this year.

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The model will have generative support for 10 Indian languages and will be able to take inputs in 22 languages. It has been trained on more than two trillion tokens of data for Indian languages, Aggarwal had said. Token is a basic unit of data like text or code that an LLM uses to process and generate language.

Senior company executives had also claimed in December that Krutrim has outperformed OpenAI’s GPT4 on Indian languages, both in terms of timing and computation. In English, they said, it performed better than Meta’s Llama 2 chat, but was behind GPT4, Google’s Bard and Gemini, though the metrics for the comparison weren’t entirely clarified. ET could not independently verify the claims made by the company.

The global LLM race has been heating up over the past few months, with Microsoft-backed OpenAI launching its GPT store on January 10, which allows users to share their own custom chatbots. However, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for global AI giants. On Thursday, the US Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into the investments made by Microsoft, Amazon and Google into OpenAI and another AI startup Anthropic.

Krutrim is among three unicorn firms founded and run by Aggarwal, who cofounded Ola Cabs. At a media conference on Thursday, Aggarwal called the three firms a “joint family”, saying that he was dividing his time between the ventures.

Aggarwal has also tried to find synergies between the three firms. For instance, Krutrim will be used by teams like sales and customer service inside the two Ola companies by March 2024 for various tasks, he said in December. On the other hand, Ola Cabs exclusively uses electric scooters made by Ola Electric for its new two-wheeler ride-hailing unit, for which it had purchased about 8,000 electric scooters from the latter.

The AI firm, founded by Ola Electric’s Bhavish Aggarwal, raised the capital from investors led by venture capital fund Matrix Partners India. Unicorns are privately-held startups valued at $1 billion or more.

Krutrim did not provide further details of the funding round. Last October, the firm had raised $24 million in debt from Matrix Partners, which is also an investor in Aggarwal’s ride-hailing company Ola and electric two-wheeler maker Ola Electric.

“India has to build its own AI, and at Krutrim, we are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack,” Aggarwal said in a statement.
Last December, Krutrim had announced its large language model (LLM) in two formats. While the company opened registrations for the base format, Krutrim, it is expected to make a public launch this month, Aggarwal said at the time. The more sophisticated Krutrim Pro format featuring vision, speech, and task execution capabilities will be available later this year.

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The model will have generative support for 10 Indian languages and will be able to take inputs in 22 languages. It has been trained on more than two trillion tokens of data for Indian languages, Aggarwal had said. Token is a basic unit of data like text or code that an LLM uses to process and generate language.

Senior company executives had also claimed in December that Krutrim has outperformed OpenAI’s GPT4 on Indian languages, both in terms of timing and computation. In English, they said, it performed better than Meta’s Llama 2 chat, but was behind GPT4, Google’s Bard and Gemini, though the metrics for the comparison weren’t entirely clarified. ET could not independently verify the claims made by the company.

The global LLM race has been heating up over the past few months, with Microsoft-backed OpenAI launching its GPT store on January 10, which allows users to share their own custom chatbots. However, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for global AI giants. On Thursday, the US Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into the investments made by Microsoft, Amazon and Google into OpenAI and another AI startup Anthropic.

Krutrim is among three unicorn firms founded and run by Aggarwal, who cofounded Ola Cabs. At a media conference on Thursday, Aggarwal called the three firms a “joint family”, saying that he was dividing his time between the ventures.

Aggarwal has also tried to find synergies between the three firms. For instance, Krutrim will be used by teams like sales and customer service inside the two Ola companies by March 2024 for various tasks, he said in December. On the other hand, Ola Cabs exclusively uses electric scooters made by Ola Electric for its new two-wheeler ride-hailing unit, for which it had purchased about 8,000 electric scooters from the latter.