Ola Co-Founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s AI Startup Gets Unicorn Status, Secures $50 Million Funding

The co-founder of Ola, Bhavish Aggarwal’s, AI startup named Krutrim has now gained unicorn status after securing $50 million in funding from investors including Matrix Partners India. The firm in a blog post stated that it has become the first Indian AI startup to gain a billion-dollar valuation, a mere month after debuting a large language model. Krutrim, which means ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, is developing data centres with the aim of creating servers and supercomputers for the AI ecosystem.

The announcement came just days after the AI startup had raised an amount of $41 million in an investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla and others.

The founder, Aggarwal, said, “India has to build its own AI. We are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack.”

Race Between Nations To Build Their Own AI Systems

OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT more than a year ago in front of the world and since then, a number of Indian startups and academic groups have been in the race to build large language models in Indian languages, also termed as the Indic LLMs. Several nations are eyeing to create their own competing AI systems instead of relying on the technology from the US and China. In fact, in Europe, investors are pouring cash into France’s Mistral AI, valued at $2 billion after being founded last year.

The United Arab Emirates is hailing its Falcon model, and promoting it. The Falcon model is backed by an Abu Dhabi government research institute.

ALSO READ | Samsung Ditches Google In China, Baidu To Power Galaxy S24 Series’ AI Features

India on the other hand, with a population of around 1.4 billion people is focusing on building smaller but more cost-efficient AI systems. Generative AI startup Sarvam, launched its first open-source Hindi LLM, OpenHathi, last month only. Notably, Sarvam has built its system using available open-source models.