Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal has committed an investment of ₹2,000 crore to his artificial intelligence initiative, Krutrim, with plans to increase it to ₹10,000 crore by next year. As part of this push, Krutrim has unveiled its AI lab, which features several key projects, including its large language models (LLMs), Krutrim-1 and Krutrim-2, along with the multilingual vision language model, Chitrarth-1, and the speech LLM, Dhwani-1. Other offerings include Krutrim Translate for text-to-text translation and BharatBench, a platform for benchmarking AI systems.
Aggarwal shared on social media: “After a year of development, we’re now open-sourcing our AI work and releasing several technical reports. Our goal is to improve AI for India, focusing on local languages, data challenges, and cultural context.”
Krutrim’s AI models have been trained on multilingual image-text data, covering 10 Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, plus English. This announcement comes at a pivotal time as India strengthens its position in the AI space, with plans to create its own large language models like Deepseek.
Aggarwal also revealed the upcoming launch of India’s first GB200, developed in collaboration with Nvidia, set to go live by March. To further accelerate AI development, Krutrim has launched its cloud service, Krutrim Cloud, offering advanced GPU resources to developers and enterprises. The company has also open-sourced its speech-to-text translation features.
Founded in 2023, Krutrim has already raised $50 million and is valued at $1 billion, securing its place as India’s first AI start-up unicorn. Matrix Partners India, a key investor in Ola Cabs and Ola Electric, led the funding round.
