AI unicorn: Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s Krutrim becomes India’s first $1 billion AI startup

Krutrim, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, has achieved unicorn status following a successful funding round that secured $50 million from prominent investors, including Matrix Partners India.

In a recent blog post, the company proudly announced its newfound status as the first Indian AI startup to reach a billion-dollar valuation, a remarkable feat achieved within a month of unveiling a large language model. 

The startup, aptly named Krutrim, translating to "artificial" in Sanskrit, is not only focusing on advancing AI language capabilities but is also delving into the development of data centres. The ultimate goal is to create servers and supercomputers tailored to the evolving needs of the AI ecosystem.

Krutrim is a family of Large Language Models, including Krutrim base and Krutrim Pro which will have multimodal, larger knowledge capabilities, and many other technical advancements for inference. According to the company's blog post, it is trained on over 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim accomplishes better performance on multiple well-known, global, LLM evaluation benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA and ARC.

Krutrim will be available in beta version for consumers in February 2024. Additionally, it will also be available as an API for enterprises and developers, seeking to create AI applications. 

The race to develop large language models in Indian languages, known as Indic LLMs, has gained momentum among various Indian startups and academic groups. This surge in interest was sparked by the introduction of OpenAI's ChatGPT over a year ago. The motivation behind this push is to establish indigenous AI systems, reducing dependency on technologies originating from the United States or China.

In the European landscape, investors are channelling funds into Mistral AI, a French startup valued at $2 billion since its inception last year. Similarly, the United Arab Emirates boasts its Falcon model, backed by a government research institute in Abu Dhabi.

Meanwhile, India is adopting a strategy of developing smaller, cost-efficient AI systems. Sarvam, a generative AI startup, recently launched OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM. This move came on the heels of a substantial $41 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla, and other backers.

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Bhavish Aggarwal, renowned as the founder of the Indian ride-hailing giant Ola, highlighted the need for India to build its own AI capabilities. In a statement, he declared, "We are fully committed to building the country’s first complete AI computing stack." 

Avnish Bajaj, Founder and MD, Matrix Partners India said “Bhavish has consistently brought cutting edge tech innovation to India at scale with Ola and Ola Electric – and now excitingly with Krutrim to power the journey of ‘Viksit Bharat’ digitally. We are incredibly privileged to deepen our partnership with Bhavish and Krutrim”.

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