Krutrim AI Becomes Bhavish Aggarwal’s 3rd Unicorn, 2024’s & India’s 1st AI Unicorn

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s third startup Krutrim has become India’s first AI unicorn with a $50 Mn funding round led by a clutch of investors including Matrix Partners India.

The funding round also makes Krutrim AI 2024’s first Indian unicorn.

The AI startup will use the fresh funds to drive innovation and expand its reach globally to revolutionise the AI landscape.

“We are thrilled to announce the successful closure of our first funding round, which 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,” Aggarwal said.

With this, Krutrim, incorporated in April last year, claimed it has become the fastest Indian unicorn. However, as per Inc42 data, it is the third-fastest startup to enter the coveted unicorn club. Mensa Brands and GlobalBees are at the first and second spot, respectively, currently.

In December, Bhavish Aggarwal unveiled AI models of his new startup Krutrim AI and touted its solutions as “India’s first full-stack AI”.

Ola Krutrim AI claims to have built its AI models from scratch, having trained them on 2 Tn tokens and unique datasets. The AI models can understand over 20 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages, including Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi.

The word Krutrim is taken from the Sanskrit language and means “artificial”.

Krutrim is a family of LLMs, including Krutrim base and Krutrim Pro which will have multi-modal, larger knowledge capabilities, and many other technical advancements for inference. The company claims that the model accomplishes better performance on multiple well-known, global, LLM evaluation benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA and ARC.

Aggarwal incorporated the startup, Krutrim Si Designs Private Limited, in April last year with Ola’s parent ANI Technologies’ long-time board member Tenneti Venugopala Krishnamurthy as its director.

The startup raised $24 Mn in debt from Matrix Partners in 2023 October. Inc42 reported earlier that Krutrim was in the process of securing another round of funds, with the announcement expected before March 2024.

According to Inc42’s ‘India’s Generative AI Startup Landscape, 2023’ report, the country’s GenAI market will be growing exponentially in the next few years. It is projected to surpass $17 Bn by 2030 from $1.1 Bn in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 48%.