Krutrim Fundrising
The artificial intelligence (AI) business Krutrim, founded by Ola founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal, made news on January 26 when it said it had secured $50 million at a $1billion valuation, making it the first unicorn startup in India by 2024.
India needs to build it own AI, and we @Krutrim are committing ourselves to building the country's complete AI computing stack. We are excited to announce the successful closure of our first funding round making कृत्रिम – India's fastest Unicorn and also the first AI unicorn 🙂… pic.twitter.com/sORXgTKjki
— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) January 26, 2024
This investment shows that investors are becoming more interested in AI firms; just six months ago, the AI startup Krutrim successfully raised million in seed and Series A funding rounds, lead by the AI startup Servam AI. Krutrim calls itself the first AI unicorn in the nation.
Leading the funding round was Matrix Partners India, who has previously backed Aggarwal’s other businesses, Ola Cabs and the soon-to-be-IPO Ola Electric.
With the money it has raised, Krutrim hopes to change the AI industry, promote innovation, and broaden its worldwide reach. According to a statement from Aggarwal, the investment shows investors’ faith in Krutrim’s potential to transform the world while also acknowledging the company’s creative use of AI.
Avnish Bajaj, managing director and co-founder of Matrix Partners India, expressed excitement, saying that Bhavish Aggarwal is empowering the “Digital Bharat” journey with Krutrim. Bhavish Aggarwal has continuously brought significant technological innovations to India with Ola and Ola Electric.
Recognizing the need for India to establish its own AI capabilities, we are thrilled to announce our partnership with @bhash for @Krutrim, India's pioneering AI company dedicated to constructing the complete AI computing stack.
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— Matrix India (@matrixindiavc) January 26, 2024
What is Krutrim?
Krutrim, which translates to “artificial” from Sanskrit, is devoted to developing the full stack of AI computing. The business debuted its first family of large language models (LLMs), dubbed Krutrim, in December 2023. The models, which are available in two versions—Krutrim Base and Krutrim Pro—were trained by a group of computer scientists in Bengaluru and San Francisco. The latter is a larger, more intricate model.
Krutrim Pro, which is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2024, is a multimodal model that can comprehend and process many formats at once, including text, voice, photos, and videos. It will also have deep understanding, sophisticated problem-solving skills, and task-execution abilities.
According to Krutrim, its models surpass many benchmarked open-source LLMs in displaying comparable volumes of data. These models were trained on 2 trillion tokens of Indian data, which is the broadest representation of Indian culture and languages. Additionally, the business claims that it performs better at presenting Indian language than OpenAI’s GPT-4.
As Aggarwal stated last month, Krutrim operates independently within the Ola Group but does not use data from Ola Electric and its cab companies to train its AI algorithms.
Similar to Google’s BERT and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Krutrim’s AI assistant will enable a conversational AI that can comprehend and speak a variety of Indian languages. In addition to being made available as an API to developers and business owners interested in developing AI applications, the assistant will go on sale in beta form in February 2024. Aggarwal stated that a “pricing structure that prioritizes India” will be accessible.
Apart from its AI models, Krutrim also intends to design and produce its own circuits and silicon. In order to build a domestic data center and eventually work on edge computing, AI computing, and supercomputers, the company is also developing AI infrastructure. A manufacturing plan is scheduled to be established by the end of 2025, and the prototype is anticipated to be ready for production by mid-2024.
By March 2024, Ola intends to incorporate Krutrim into its network of enterprises, merging the startup with its other technology-driven operations, services, and support roles.