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Krutrim Founder Bhavish Aggarwal
Ola Electric founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has announced a Rs 2,000 crore (around $230 million) investment in Krutrim, India’s first AI unicorn, with a further commitment of Rs 10,000 crore by the next year.
Aggarwal also announced the launch of Krutrim AI Lab in a bid to boost open-source AI research and development. The startup said the new lab aims to provide cutting-edge infrastructure for AI projects, foster collaboration with academia and startups, and address linguistic and data challenges unique to India.
Announcing the @Krutrim AI lab today! https://t.co/s5DmiGhQoo
— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) February 4, 2025
While we’ve been working on AI for a year, today we’re releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports.
Our focus is on developing AI for India - to make AI better on… pic.twitter.com/M5nBtlE5p0
Aiming to build India’s largest supercomputer
Krutrim also strengthens its global collaborations, by announcing India’s first GB200 cluster deployment along with NVIDIA scheduled to go live by March 2025. The AI startup aims to build India’s largest supercomputer in India by the end of the year.
Aggarwal, who also founded ride-hailing firm Ola and EV manufacturer Ola Electric, said Krutrim was conceived to make AI more relevant and accessible for Indian users.
"With Krutrim, our vision is to develop AI for India and make it better for Indian languages, data scarcity and cultural context. While we are behind global benchmarks, we have made good progress in the last year. With Krutrim AI Lab, we hope that the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem," Aggarwal said.
The startup said that the new AI Lab champions open-source AI and democratises AI innovation by fostering partnerships with academia, startups, and developers. It deploys state-of-the-art computing resources to accelerate AI capabilities.
With its multilingual AI models that represent India’s diverse linguistic landscape, Krutrim AI Lab ensures equitable access to AI across all Indian languages. By creating AI solutions optimised for scale and affordability, the research lab enables cost-efficient AI innovation and attracts top talent that pushes the boundaries of AI knowledge.
Releasing models
The newly launched AI Lab will house advanced computing tools, including a suite of new AI models and an in-house benchmarking system called “BharatBench,” designed to evaluate Indic performance.
Among the models unveiled, Krutrim-2 updates the original Krutrim-1 large language model from January 2024, while Chitrarth 1 adds vision-language capabilities. Dhwani 1 addresses speech translation, Vyakhyarth 1 provides state-of-the-art embedding for search and retrieval, and Krutrim Translate 1 handles text-to-text translations.
These technologies, according to the startup, will help Indian developers build AI applications in sectors such as education, healthcare, and financial services.
Krutrim AI Lab focuses on critical AI research domains essential for digital transformation and development of India’s first large-scale AI models, capable of competing globally. The multimodal Lab is aimed at building AI that understands and processes text, speech, and visuals across multiple languages. It also addresses India’s data scarcity challenge by digitising knowledge artefacts and creating high-quality datasets.
Additionally, by incorporating AI on a real-world scale, Krutrim AI Lab ensures AI systems that are efficient and adaptable to India’s high-volume, resource-constrained environments, the release notes.
Expansion of cloud portfolio
Krutrim previously announced over 50 new services on Krutrim cloud making it ready for most applications needed by Indian developers. The infrastructure services include Virtual Machines (VMs), cloud storage, state-of-the-art security measures for data protection and cutting-edge observability features for precise data monitoring.
Additionally, the AI cloud services announced were AI Pods to enable low-cost access to best-in-class GPUs, AI studio for building compound AI applications, model catalogue with latest LLMs and vision models, and now code/low code training, finetuning, inference and model evaluation capabilities.
The startup also announced its plans to scale up its data centre capacity to a massive 1 GW by 2028. The data centre will be a computing and data storage powerhouse, enabling Krutrim to offer world-class AI services to India and the world.