Ola's Krutrim achieves Unicorn status, becomes India's first

Bhavish Aggarwal, a serial entrepreneur, founded the AI startup Krutrim/कृत्रिम, which has achieved unicorn status after raising $50 million in a successful funding round. After launching a large language model just a month ago, the company has achieved a remarkable milestone: it is now the first AI startup in India to be valued at $1 billion.

Krutrim: India’s own AI

The company, appropriately called Krutrim, which means "artificial" in Sanskrit, is exploring the development of data centres in addition to enhancing AI language capabilities. The ultimate objective is to build supercomputers and servers that are suited to the changing requirements of the AI ecosystem.

The कृत्रिम family of large language models includes Krutrim Pro and base, with multimodal and larger knowledge capabilities. The model has been trained on over two trillion tokens and demonstrated superior performance on globally recognized LLM evaluation benchmarks like MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA, and ARC. Krutrim, an AI application platform, will launch in beta in February 2024 for consumers and as an API for enterprises and developers.

Investors View:

European investors are investing in French startup Mistral AI, UAE's Falcon model, and India's Sarvam, a generative AI startup, which recently launched OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM. European startups Mistral AI and Falcon are valued at $2 billion and $41 million respectively. India is also developing smaller, more cost-efficient AI systems, with Sarvam's OpenHathi being its first open-source Hindi LLM.

Being grateful:

The founder of the well-known Indian ride-hailing company Ola, Bhavish Aggarwal, emphasised the necessity for India to develop its own AI capabilities. We are fully committed to building the country's first complete AI computing stack, he said in a statement.

Bhavish has consistently brought cutting-edge tech innovation to India at scale with Ola and Ola Electric—and now excitingly with कृत्रिम—to power the journey of 'Viksit Bharat' digitally, said Avnish Bajaj, Founder and MD of Matrix Partners India. We feel immensely fortunate to have strengthened our relationship with Bhavish and Krutrim.