Ola Krutrim announces ₹2,000-crore investment; unveils an AI lab

Ola Founder Bhavish Aggarwal has announced an investment of ₹2,000 crore in his artificial intelligence venture Krutrim, with a commitment of ₹10,000 crore by next year He has also launched an AI lab with large language models (LLMs ) Krutrim-2 and Krutrim 1, multilingual vision language model Chitrarth-1; speech LLM Dhwani-1, Krutrim Translate for text-to-text translation, and BharatBench, a platform that evaluates and sets benchmarks.

“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 Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context etc,” Aggarwal said in an X post.

The company said that it was trained on multilingual image-text data and works across 10 Indian languages—Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Assamese, and English as well. This comes at a time when India is ramping up its AI efforts. India is set to take a major leap in artificial intelligence (AI) by developing its own large language model (LLM), similar to Deepseek.

He also announced deployment of India’s first GB200 in partnership with Nvidia, which is expected to go live by March.

Krutrim launched AI cloud services, called Krutrim Cloud, to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity later today.

The company also open-sourced the speech-to-text translation capabilities of its model. Launched in 2023, Krutrim has raised $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion, making it the first start-up unicorn in the country in 2024. Matrix Partners India, an early backer of other ventures Ola Cabs and the IPO-bound Ola Electric, led the funding round.