Krutrim: Bhavish Aggarwal’s AI Startup Revolutionising Indian Language Technology

Krutrim, founded by Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, is making waves in the artificial intelligence sector with an impressive investment of ₹2,000 crore. Plans are underway to enhance this investment to ₹10,000 crore by the end of the next year. The startup has also set up an advanced AI lab and unveiled a range of innovative language models to improve AI capabilities for Indian languages.

Innovative AI Language Models

Among the new models launched by Krutrim are Krutrim-2 and Krutrim-1, which are large language models designed for broad AI applications. Additionally, there is Chitrarth-1, a vision-language model; Dhwani-1, which is dedicated to speech processing; and Krutrim Translate that focuses on text-to-text translation. Furthermore, Krutrim has introduced BharatBench, a platform aimed at testing and benchmarking various AI models.

Focus on Indian-Specific AI Challenges

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Aggarwal highlighted that the company’s mission is to create AI solutions specifically tailored for India, tackling challenges like diverse languages, limited data, and cultural subtleties. He announced segments of Krutrim’s work will be open-sourced, enabling developers and researchers to utilise its speech-to-text translation technologies.

Supporting India’s Linguistic Diversity

The models developed by Krutrim are trained using multilingual datasets and support ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Assamese, in addition to English.

Advancing AI Initiatives in India

This initiative coincides with India’s rapid progress in AI, including plans to create a large language model akin to China’s DeepSeek. As part of this ambitious undertaking, Krutrim is launching India’s inaugural GB200 AI supercomputer in collaboration with Nvidia, expected to go operational by March. Additionally, the company has rolled out Krutrim Cloud, a cloud-based service offering developers and businesses access to high-performance computing resources.

Milestones and Future Plans

Since its inception in 2023, Krutrim has successfully raised $50 million, achieving a remarkable valuation of $1 billion, making it the first AI startup in India to reach unicorn status by 2024. The funding round was spearheaded by Matrix Partners India, who have also previously invested in Aggarwal’s other ventures, Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.