Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal's Krutrim becomes India's first AI unicorn startup

Serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal's AI startup, Krutrim has reached $1 billion valuation after receiving $50 million in funding from investors including Matrix Partners India. With this, Krutrim becomes the first AI startup in India to gain Unicorn status

Krutrim - AI startup

Krutrim has received a billion-dollar valuation, a mere month after debuting a large language model, the firm said in a blog post. Krutrim, which translates to “artificial" in Sanskrit, is also developing data centers and will ultimately aim to create servers and super computers for the AI ecosystem.

“India has to build its own AI," Aggarwal, the founder of Indian ride-hailing startup Ola, said in the statement. “We are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack."

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Following the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, many India based startups and academic groups are racing to build large language models in Indian languages, named Indic LLMs. Other countries are also looking to build their own systems rather than relying heavily on US and China. In Europe, investors are pouring cash into France’s Mistral AI, valued at $2 billion after being founded last year. The United Arab Emirates touts its Falcon model, which is backed by an Abu Dhabi government research institute.

As per Mint, Indian is focusing on building smaller, more cost efficient AI systems. Generative AI startup Sarvam, which built its system using available open-source models, launched OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM last month. The announcement came days after it had raised $41 million in an investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla and others.