Ola founder invests $230 million in Krutrim, launches five AI models

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Tuesday announced an investment of ₹20 billion (about $230 million) into his artificial intelligence (AI) startup Krutrim, adding that he would invest ₹100 billion ($1.16 billion) by next year.

Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Ola Consumer and founder of Ola Electric, also announced the launch of five AI tools, an Indian AI platform – Bharat Bench – and a Krutrim AI Lab that promises to release its work to the open source community.

Krutrim, the AI startup founded by Aggarwal, had become India’s first AI unicorn in January last year after securing $50 million in funding from investors led by Matrix Partners India.

Announcing the @Krutrim AI lab today! https://t.co/s5DmiGhQoo

While we’ve been working on AI for a year, today we’re releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports.
Our focus is on developing AI for India – to make AI better on… pic.twitter.com/M5nBtlE5p0

— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) February 4, 2025

The five AI models Krutrim launched include advanced large language model Krutrim 2; vision language model Chitrarth 1; speech-language model Dhwani 1; advanced AI model developed for representing Indian languages Vakyarth 1; and text-to-text translation model Krutrim Translate 1.

While Krutrim 2 is an improved version of the large language model Krutrim 1 (India’s first LLM), which was launched in January last year, Aggarwal said the latter was a basic 7B model while Krutrim 2, launched on Tuesday, is a much-improved model.

The Krutrim translate model supports nine languages: English, Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Telugu, and Tamil. This AI model translates the input text into any of the chosen Indic languages.

Although many current AI models do not work well with Indian languages, Aggarwal said that Bharat Bench offers a report card for AI models to check if they are ready for the Indian market and which ones need improvement.

“Recent advancements, such as those demonstrated by DeepSeek, have shown that AI breakthroughs are not limited to Silicon Valley. We acknowledge their remarkable achievements. Meanwhile, we have been steadfastly building AI for India. It’s time for India to compete with the world,” a blog post on the AI lab’s webpage said.