Ola’s AI Arm Krutrim Denies Report Of $300 Mn Fundraising Plan

SUMMARY

Bhavish Aggarwal’s artificial intelligence venture Krutrim has denied a recent media report about the company’s plans to raise $300 Mn (around INR 2,561 Cr)

Krutrim presently is not raising any external equity as the company is well funded by the promoter and select investors

Aggarwal last announced an investment of INR 2,000 Cr (nearly $234.3 Mn) into its AI unicorn Krutrim in February

Update | April 21, 05:00 PM

Bhavish Aggarwal’s artificial intelligence venture Krutrim has denied a recent media report about the company’s plans to raise $300 Mn (around INR 2,561 Cr) in an external equity funding.

The company clarified that it is not engaged in any discussion to secure external equity, saying that the article misrepresented its financial strategy and operations.

“…Krutrim presently is not raising any external equity as the company is well funded by the promoter and select investors and it continues to invest towards executing its AI strategy,” the company said in a statement.

“Krutrim remains focused on building cutting-edge full-stack AI technologies & infrastructure in India, and will continue to share material developments through official, transparent channels at the appropriate time,” it added.

Original | April 21, 10:42 AM

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal is reportedly seeking to raise up to Bhavish Aggarwal is reportedly eyeing to secure an investment of $300 Mn (around INR 2,561 Cr) in a mix of equity and debt for his artificial intelligence firm Krutrim.

A Mint report, citing people close to the matter, said that Aggarwal’s fresh fundraise size is lower than that of his earlier $500 Mn funding plan amid poor investor appetite.

The report further said while there has been no concrete investment offers for Krutrim in the next funding round, Aggarwal is confident of bringing multiple big-ticket investors to the cap table in the coming months.

It further said that possible investors to join the company’s new funding round include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and SBI Capital Markets.

Founded in 2023, Krutrim offers GPU-as-a-service, model-as-a-service, along with other multiple no-code platforms. It became a unicorn in January 2024 after raising $50 Mn in a round led by Z47 (erstwhile Matrix Partners India).

Aggarwal last announced an investment of INR 2,000 Cr (nearly $234.3 Mn) into its AI unicorn Krutrim in February, with a commitment of INR 10,000 Cr (around $1.18 Bn) by 2026, with an eye to advance AI innovation and strengthening India’s position in the global AI landscape.

Weeks after that, he also pledged an additional 5.88 Cr shares of Ola Electric to raise debt for Krutrim. To note, Aggarwal pledged about 2.43% shares of Ola Electric, or 8.09% of his shareholding in the company, to raise capital for Krutrim so far.

Additionally, the company’s frontier artificial intelligence research lab was launched in February, aimed at developing AI to serve better on Indian languages, data scarcity and cultural context, among others.

Krutrim recently initiated hosting Meta’s Llama 4 models on its cloud platform, where Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick will be available for developers to test, build, and deploy applications in the price range of INR 7 to INR 17 per Mn tokens.

In January, the AI unicorn began hosting open source AI models of Chinese GenAI company DeepSeek on its cloud platform. Weeks after that, it also deployed DeepSeek’s new R1 671B model on Nvidia’s H100 graphics processing units in India.