Ola Founder’s Krutrim Emerges as India’s First AI Unicorn: Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder of Ola, has announced that his artificial intelligence business Krutrim has raised $1 billion in funding. The business made the bold claim in a press statement that it became the fastest unicorn in India after being created last year. Claiming to be the first Indian AI startup to achieve unicorn status, it made history.
In Krutrim, the $50 million “first round” was led by Matrix Partners India, which had previously supported Ola, Aggarwal’s ride-hailing platform, and Ola Electric, his electric vehicle business. A year ago, TechCrunch said that Aggarwal was negotiating a $50 million fundraising round for his artificial intelligence startup.
The Sanskrit word for “artificial” is Krutrim, and it’s being used to develop a massive language model that has been trained on English and local Indian languages. The company has announced its intention to introduce a conversational AI assistant that can understand and speak many Indian languages using voice commands.
Next month, it will release an alpha version of its namesake chatbot to the public, and then it will roll out application programming interfaces to businesses and developers. Krutrim also intends to build an in-house capability to produce AI-optimized computing circuits, according to its website. According to an earlier report by TechCrunch, Aggarwal’s new firm will focus on semiconductor development and design.
The third initiative for Aggarwal is Krutrim. He is targeting profitability with his first venture, Ola, which dominates the Indian ride-hailing business. Recently, Ola Electric, the market leader in India for electric two-wheelers, completed the necessary papers for an initial public offering (IPO) valued at $662 million.
“India must develop its own artificial intelligence system, and here at कृत्रिम, we are entirely dedicated to creating the first comprehensive AI computing stack for the nation,” stated Aggarwal. “We are elated to share the news that our first funding round has been closed. This not only confirms the potential of कॼत्रर’s cutting-edge AI solutions, but it also shows that investors believe in our capacity to make a difference globally from India.”
Investors around the world are swarming to find and support AI breakthroughs, like Krutrim, on the theory that these developments will streamline innumerable industries and that the most innovative firms will provide returns that will last generations.
Despite having one of the biggest startup ecosystems in the world, India has failed to make a significant mark in the artificial intelligence race. Big names in language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic (supported by Amazon), and Bard (developed by Google) have not yet emerged from India to pose a serious threat.
In September, Indian conglomerate Reliance and computer graphics giant Nvidia announced their intention to construct a massive language model based on the many languages spoken in India. But the company, headed by the wealthiest man in Asia, Mukesh Ambani, has not yet released its artificial intelligence product.
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