Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal has invested ₹2,000 crore in his artificial intelligence startup, Krutrim, with plans to increase the investment to ₹10,000 crore by next year. The company has launched an AI lab and introduced several new language models to enhance AI for Indian languages.
Aggarwal detailed the new models, including Krutrim-2 and Krutrim-1, large language models for general AI tasks; Chitrarth-1, a vision-language model; Dhwani-1, focused on speech processing; and Krutrim Translate for text-to-text translation. Krutrim has also introduced BharatBench, a platform for testing and benchmarking AI models.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Aggarwal stated the company aims to develop AI tailored for India, addressing challenges such as language diversity, data limitations, and cultural nuances. He announced that parts of Krutrim’s work would be open-sourced, allowing developers and researchers to access its speech-to-text translation technology.
Krutrim’s models are trained on multilingual data and support ten Indian languages—Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Assamese—alongside English.
The announcement comes as India accelerates its AI initiatives, with plans to develop its own large language model similar to China’s DeepSeek. As part of this effort, Krutrim is deploying India’s first GB200 AI supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia, expected to go live by March. The company has also launched Krutrim Cloud, a cloud-based AI service providing developers and businesses access to high-performance computing resources.
Krutrim, launched in 2023, has already raised $50 million at a $1 billion valuation, becoming India’s first AI startup to achieve unicorn status in 2024. The funding round was led by Matrix Partners India, which has previously invested in Aggarwal’s ventures, Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.