Ola Krutrim Business Head Ravi Jain Resigns

Ola group’s artificial intelligence venture Krutrim has seen its first top-level exit at a time when it is planning to roll out new products and services, including AI chip and cloud services.

As per ET’s report, citing people close to the matter, Krutrim AI’s business head Ravi Jain has resigned.

Inc42 has reached out to Ola for comments on the development. The story will be updated based on the response.

This comes at a time when Ola chief Bhavish Aggarwal founded Krutrim has announced plans to develop India’s first homegrown family of chips for artificial intelligence, general compute and edge. The chips include Bodhi for AI, Sarv for general computing, and Ojas for Edge.

It is looking to launch the first chip by 2026 and Bodhi 2 in the coming four years (by 2028).

Krutrim has entered the unicorn club this year only, notably becoming the first homegrown AI startup to secure the status.

Aggarwal, during annual event in August, also mentioned that Krutrim will scale up its data centre capacity to 1 GW by 2028 from the current 20 MW.

The startup in May, two months after it launched its chatbot, released an Android app for its AI chatbot. 

Krutrim first unveiled its AI models in December last year and showcased its AI chatbot, which functions similarly to other open-source large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama 2.

The startup became India’s first AI unicorn after raising a $50 Mn funding round in January. The funding round was led by a clutch of investors including Matrix Partners India. The Bengaluru-based startup was launched in April last year. 

It competes with the likes of Bharat GPT by CoRover.ai, Pragna by Soket Labs, Tech Mahindra-backed Project Indus, and Lightspeed-backed Sarvam AI in India.

In April, Inc42 reported Ola Cab’s CEO Hemant Bakshi has quit the startup within months of joining. At the time, the ride hailing major also laid off around 10% of its workforce, or about 200 employees, in a restructuring exercise. 

Citing reason for layoffs, Aggarwal said Ola Cabs has made substantial investments in artificial intelligence (AI), which has led to significant cost advantages, reported TechCrunch. 

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