Ola Founder’s Krutrim Emerges As First $1 Billion Indian AI Startup

Krutrim, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup initiated by serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, has accomplished unicorn status after the positive funding round that secured $50 million from leading investors, that included Matrix Partners India.

In a latest blog post, the company declared its brand-new status as the first Indian AI startup to achieve a billion-dollar valuation, an extraordinary achievement achieved within a month of unveiling a large language model.

The startup, aptly named Krutrim, translating to "artificial" in Sanskrit, is not only focusing on advancing AI language capabilities but is also delving into the development of data centres. The ultimate goal is to create servers and supercomputers tailored to the evolving needs of the AI ecosystem, according to a report published in Business Today.

Krutrim is a family of Large Language Models, including Krutrim base and Krutrim Pro which will have multimodal, larger knowledge capabilities, and many other technical advancements for inference. According to the company's blog post, it is trained on over 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim accomplishes better performance on multiple well-known, global, LLM evaluation benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA and ARC, added the Business Today report.

Krutrim will be available in beta version for consumers in February 2024. Additionally, it will also be available as an API for enterprises and developers, seeking to create AI applications.

The race to develop large language models in Indian languages, known as Indic LLMs, has gained momentum among various Indian startups and academic groups. This surge in interest was sparked by the introduction of OpenAI's ChatGPT over a year ago. The motivation behind this push is to establish indigenous AI systems, reducing dependency on technologies originating from the United States or China, stated the Business Today report.

In the European landscape, investors are channelling funds into Mistral AI, a French startup valued at $2 billion since its inception last year. Similarly, the United Arab Emirates boasts its Falcon model, backed by a government research institute in Abu Dhabi.