Bhavish’s Krutrim becomes First $1 billion AI start-up in India

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal has once again surprised the tech industries in India by earning the unicorn status after securing $50 million in his latest venture- Krutrim. 

“India Has To Build Its Own AI,” he said in a statement. “We are fully committed to building the country’s first complete AI computing Stack, ” he added.

Krutrim, the AI start-up, has secured about $50 million in funding from investors, including Matrix Partners India. Hence, it is the first Indian AI start-up to gain a billion-dollar valuation. The firm said in a blog post that this comes just a month after it debuted in a large language model.

Krutrim, which means “artificial” in Sanskrit, is also developing data centres that aim to create servers and supercomputers for the AI ecosystem.  

A cluster of Indian start-ups and academic groups are in a race to build large Indian language models after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT more than a year ago.

Several countries hope to create competing AI systems rather than importing technologies from the US and China. Interestingly, even European investors are spending lots of money on France’s Mistral AI, which is valued at $2 billion after being founded in 2023.

Meanwhile, India, with a population of over 1.4 billion people, is focusing on building smaller but cost-efficient AI systems. Generative AI start-up Sarvam built its system using available open-source models and launched OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM, in December 2023.

The statement said that this announcement came days after it had raised over $41 million in an investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla and others.