Ola Steps Up Hiring For Krutrim AI Labs Amid Exits: Report

Amid a series of high-profile exits over the past year, Ola group’s artificial intelligence venture Krutrim is reportedly stepping up hiring efforts for its AI labs located in Bengaluru, US and Singapore.

An ET report said that the startup is actively recruiting for roles such as GenAI research engineer, research scientist for speech and audio recognition, and AI cloud platform engineer.

Confirming the hiring plans, Krutrim’s spokesperson told Inc42, “Krutrim has a bold mission to build the full AI stack for India — from frontier AI model development, and AI Cloud, to silicon design. There is a lot of interest amongst top talent globally towards this mission, and we are bringing together exceptional minds from India, Singapore, Silicon Valley to help shape this future of AI.”

Recently, the startup appointed Sunit S as senior vice president of product, as a part of its commitment to bolster its leadership team. However, the company also witnessed two senior departures earlier this year, including applied AI director Ashish Kumar and senior engineering manager Priyanka Nayak.

While Kumar stepped down in February after working about a year with Krutrim, Nayak exited in January after an 18-month stint.

Despite these challenges, CEO Bhavish Aggarwal is optimistic about the AI unicorn’s future. In February, the company announced plans to invest INR 2,000 Cr in Krutrim, with a commitment of INR 10,000 Cr by next year.

Aggarwal also revealed that Krutrim is building its AI models, including Krutrim 2 LLM, vision language model Chitrarth 1 and speech language model Dhwani, accessible to the open source community.

The announcement of rolling out the Krutrim AI lab was made in February, just days after Krutrim announced it is hosting open source AI models of Chinese GenAI company DeepSeek on its cloud platform.

Krutrim AI Lab has released a host of models that aims to redefine the AI ecosystem in India including Krutrim 2 and Krutrim 1 LLMs, Chitrarth, Dhwani , Vyakhyarth 1 and Krutrim Translate 1. It also  introduced BharatBench, a tool designed to assess AI models’ effectiveness in Indian contexts.

Amid growing demand for AI services, investor interest in the sector is gaining significant momentum. India’s GenAI startup brigade has raised $1.2 Bn in funding since 2014.

Besides, the Centre is also ramping up its efforts to develop AI models in the country through its IndiaAI mission. Recently, a report surfaced that the government has been inviting private entities, including startups to share anonymous, non-personal datasets of their users to the AIKosha platform.

AIKosha features AI sandbox capabilities via integrated development environment along with tools and tutorials, while also equipped with features such as content discoverability, scoring of datasets, permission based access and security mechanisms, secure APIs and firewalls.

In January, union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India is planning to build its own domestic large language model (LLM) as part of the INR 10,037 Cr IndiaAI Mission.

As per Inc42 data, the homegrown GenAI market is expected to see a major boom in the coming years and will likely cross the $17 Bn mark by 2030.