Artificial Intelligence (AI) start-up Krutrim, launched by Ola founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal, has raised $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Matrix Partners India and others.
The first AI unicorn, Krutrim will use the funding to accelerate its mission to revolutionise the artificial intelligence landscape and expand its reach globally, the firm said in a statement.
“India has to build its own AI, and at Krutrim we are committed to building the country’s first complete AI computing stack. We are thrilled to announce the successful closure of our first funding round, which 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 for the world,” said Aggarwal.
Krutrim, ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, will come in two models: a base model named Krutrim trained on 2 trillion tokens and unique datasets, and a larger, more complex model called Krutrim Pro, launching in the next quarter for advanced problem-solving and task execution capabilities.
Krutrim understands 22 Indian languages and can generate content in about 10, including Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Odia, Gujarati, and Malayalam. At the launch, Aggarwal previewed an AI chatbot powered by Krutrim that performs functions similar to that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
It has been trained on over two trillion tokens of data for Indian languages, with the base model incorporating around 20 times more Indic tokens than any other model in existence. The Krutrim team is based across India and the Bay Area (US).
“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 ‘Viksit Bharat’ journey digitally. We are incredibly privileged to deepen our partnership with Bhavish and Krutrim,” said Avnish Bajaj, Founder and MD, Matrix Partners India.