Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup founded by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, said it has raised a funding round valuing it at $1 billion. The startup, founded last year, is the fastest to become a unicorn in India, it claimed in a press release. It is also the first Indian AI startup to become a unicorn.
Matrix Partners India – which has also backed Aggarwal’s other two startups, ride-hailing platform Ola and electric vehicle startup Ola Electric – led a $50 million ‘seed round’ in Krutrim. TechCrunch reported last year that Aggarwal was in talks to raise $50 million for his new AI venture.
Crotrim, which means “artificial” in Sanskrit, is building a large language model that has been trained on local Indian languages as well as English. The startup said it plans to launch a voice-enabled conversational AI assistant that understands and speaks multiple Indian languages.
It plans to make a beta version of its chatbot available to consumers next month and follow up by rolling out APIs to developers and enterprises. Crotrim says on its website that it also plans to develop in-house capacity to manufacture chips optimized for AI computing. TechCrunch previously reported that Aggarwal’s new project will explore chip development and design.
Krutrim is Aggarwal’s third project. Firstly, his first company, is leading the passenger transportation market in India and looking forward to profitability. Ola Electric leads the electric two-wheeler market in India and recently filed paperwork for a $662 million IPO.
“India must build its own AI, and at Catrim, we are fully committed to building the country’s first full-fledged AI computing cluster,” Aggarwal said in a statement. “We are pleased to announce the successful closing of our first funding round, which not only underscores the potential of KATRIM’s innovative AI solutions but also underscores investors’ confidence in our ability to bring meaningful change from India to the world.”
The investment in Crotrim comes at a time when investors globally are rushing to identify and back AI breakthroughs, riding on the thesis that advances in AI will make countless industries more efficient and that the startups at the forefront will deliver returns for generations.
Despite being home to one of the world’s largest startup ecosystems, India has yet to make a material dent in the AI race. Indian contenders are yet to emerge and challenge the dominance of big language modeling giants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon-backed Anthropic, or Google’s Bard.
Indian powerhouse Reliance partnered with Nvidia in September, revealing plans to build a large language model that will be trained on India’s diverse languages. But the company — run by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest person — has yet to launch its own AI offering.
Peak XV and Lightspeed India recently backed Sarvam, an AI startup that is also building a large language model.
Training a large language model has proven to be a very expensive endeavor. OpenAI has raised more than $11 billion to date, while Anthropic has also raised billions from investors including Google and Amazon. xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, is in talks to raise up to $6 billion at a valuation of about $20 billion, the Financial Times reported on Friday.