Bhavish Aggarwal’s AI startup Krutrim turns unicorn after raising $50 mn- QHN

The platform is a family of Large Language Models (LLMs), including Krutrim base and Krutrim Pro, which will have multimodal, larger knowledge capabilities, and many other technical advancements for inference

Krutrim, the artificial intelligence (AI) venture of Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal, said that it has become a unicorn or a startup valued at more than $1 billion, after closing its first round of funding. The funding round, led by prominent investors such as Matrix Partners India and others, garnered an investment of $50 million in equity at a valuation of $1 billion.

Krutrim said that it has become India’s first AI company to attain unicorn status. The firm said it has also become the country’s fastest unicorn. The funds raised will be instrumental in accelerating the company’s mission to revolutionize the AI landscape, drive innovation, and expand its reach globally. Krutrim, meaning “artificial” in Sanskrit, was launched in April 2023.

“India has to build its own AI, and at Krutrim we are fully committed to building the country’s first complete AI computing stack,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, founder, Krutrim, and a serial entrepreneur. “The funding round, not only validates the potential of Krutrim’s innovative AI solutions but also underscores the confidence investors have in our ability to drive meaningful change out of India for the world.”

This is the third venture founded by Aggarwal, which has become a unicorn. His other ventures include mobility firm Ola (ANI Technologies) and electric vehicle maker Ola Electric. In July 2019, Ola Electric raised $250 million from SoftBank, when it was just a two-year-old firm. The investment made the fledgeling venture a unicorn. It now has a valuation of $5.4 billion and has raised a total funding of $998 million, according to data analytics firm Tracxn. The company filed a draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) on December 22, 2023, with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) ahead of the e-vehicle maker’s initial public offering (IPO).

This week, Aggarwal’s other venture Ola said that its India mobility business has turned earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (Ebitda) positive in 2022-23 (FY23), making it one of the few Indian internet companies to achieve this feat. For the consolidated entity, the revenue from operations and other income for FY23 stood at Rs 3,000 crore compared to Rs 2,120 crore in 2021-22 (FY22). The Ebitda loss for the consolidated entity, excluding discontinued business, was reduced to Rs 29 crore in FY23 from Rs 291 crore in FY22.

Matrix Partners India, which led the funding in Krutrim, is an early backer of Aggarwal’s other ventures Ola Cabs and the IPO-bound Ola Electric. Avnish Bajaj, Founder and Managing Director, Matrix Partners India said Aggarwal has consistently brought cutting-edge tech innovation to India at scale with Ola and Ola Electric – and now excitingly with Krutrim to power the journey of ‘Viksit Bharat’ digitally. “We are incredibly privileged to deepen our partnership with Bhavish (Aggarwal) and Krutrim,” said Bajaj.

Krutrim Si Designs was launched in April 2023. It was set up by Aggarwal with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti. Tenneti is one of the board members of ANI Technologies Ltd, which owns Ola and Ola Electric.

Aggarwal unveiled Krutrim’s base Large Language Model (LLM) in December 2023. He has joined the increasingly competitive AI race dominated by players such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. With the largest representation of Indian data used for its training, it powers generative AI applications for all Indian languages. Trained by a team of leading computer scientists, based in Bengaluru and San Francisco, this model will also power Krutrim’s conversational AI assistant that understands and speaks multiple Indian languages fluently.

The platform is a family of Large Language Models (LLMs), including Krutrim base and Krutrim Pro, which will have multimodal, larger knowledge capabilities, and many other technical advancements for inference. Trained on over 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim said it accomplishes better performance on multiple well-known, global, LLM evaluation benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA, and ARC.

The platform’s model can fluently switch between languages and discuss nuanced topics ranging from poetry in Bengali to Bollywood movies, to creative masala dosa recipes. Krutrim will be available in beta version for consumers in February 2024. Additionally, it will also be available as an API (application programming interface) for enterprises and developers, seeking to create AI applications. The company is also working on AI infrastructure to develop indigenous data centres and eventually, server-computing, edge-computing, and super-computers.

Krutrim’s funding comes at a time when Indian generative AI startup Sarvam AI recently unveiled OpenHathi, the first Hindi large language model. Sarvam recently raised $41 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed and supported by Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam is developing a “full-stack” product that can be used for training custom AI models or as an enterprise-grade platform. The company said a full-stack approach will accelerate GenAI adoption in India, given that enterprises acknowledge the technology’s potential but are grappling with how to leverage it for business.

Tech giant Alphabet recently introduced its most advanced artificial intelligence model, a technology capable of crunching different forms of information such as video, audio, and text. Called Gemini, the Google owner’s highly anticipated AI model is capable of more sophisticated reasoning and understanding information with a greater degree of nuance than Google’s prior technology, the company said.

First Published: Jan 26 2024 | 6:00 PM IST