Krutrim, an artificial intelligence (AI) business founded by Ola founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal, stated on January 26 that it has secured $50 million at a $1 billion valuation, making it the country’s first startup unicorn in 2024.
This investment comes just after the six-month-old AI business Sarvam AI secured $41 million in seed and Series A funding, indicating increased investor interest in AI startups. Krutrim stated that it is the first AI unicorn in the country.
Matrix Partners India, an early supporter of Aggarwal’s other enterprises, Ola Cabs and the upcoming IPO Ola Electric, led the investment round. Krutrim intends to use the cash received to grow its worldwide footprint, promote innovation, and accelerate the company’s ambition to change the AI landscape.
What is Krutrim?
Krutrim is an indigenous large language model (LLM) and generative AI platform in the vein of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. It is trained on 2 trillion tokens or bits of textual information, with the most Indian data represented.
Krutrim, which means ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, will be available in two versions: a basic and a Pro model. The present basic version of Krutrim, like ChatGPT, can respond to people’s prompts or queries. It can understand 22 Indian languages and create text in ten of them, including Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Odia, Gujarati, and Malayalam. Krutrim Pro, the company’s bigger model for handling difficult problems, will also be released.
“Current AI models just cannot represent India’s culture, knowledge, and ambitions, given its heterogeneous and multilingual environment. We introduce Krutrim, a company with the sole vision of developing India’s AI for 1.4 billion Indians,” Aggarwal said during the launch last month.
Aside from the fundamental AI model for generative AI applications, the business is developing an AI computing stack in-house, which includes constructing an AI cloud infrastructure as well as in-house research and production of AI compute-optimized chips. It has created an architecture using several chipsets to power various AI infrastructures, models, and applications.
Krutrim outperforms GPT-4, OpenAI’s big language model that powers ChatGPT, on Indian languages by generating replies in less time and with less computation, according to the firm. In the English language, it outperforms Meta’s open-source big language model, Llama 2.
What do founders say?
According to Aggarwal, the fundraising 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 constantly delivered cutting-edge technological innovation to India at scale through Ola and Ola Electric. Krutrim is now ready to power the digital transformation of ‘Viksit Bharat.’ We are extremely privileged to deepen our partnership with Bhavish and Krutrim,” stated Avnish Bajaj, founder and MD of Matrix Partners India.
Krutrim will function as an independent entity within the Ola Group, similar to Ola Electric and its cab business. However, Aggarwal stated last month that the company does not train its AI models on data from these firms.
According to Ravi Jain, Ola’s chief marketing officer, Krutrim will strike the appropriate mix between performance and pricing, allowing it to power the majority of day-to-day apps.
He stated that all Ola group firms already use Krutrim for internal duties like customer support, phone and chat, and customer sales calls.
History of Aggarwal’s Krutrim
Aggarwal and Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti co-founded Krutrim Si Designs in April 2023. Tenneti serves on the board of ANI Technologies, which owns and operates Ola Cabs and Ola Electric. Matrix Partners provided $24 million in loan capital to the firm in October 2023.
Sarvam, a domestic firm, has previously launched OpenHathi, the first Hindi large-language model. It also secured $41 million last year from well-known investors such as Lightspeed Ventures, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures.
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