Krutrim AI: How Bhavish Aggarwal is Building India's First Homegrown AI Unicorn
Amit Yadav
When Bhavish Aggarwal, the co-founder of Ola, announced that he was pivoting his attention to artificial intelligence, the Indian startup ecosystem took notice. Less than a year later, his new venture Krutrim — Sanskrit for "artificial" — had become India's first AI unicorn, valued at over $1 billion. But is Krutrim building something genuinely transformative, or is it riding the AI hype wave?
Bhavish Aggarwal has never been afraid of audacious bets. He built Ola into India's answer to Uber, then pivoted into electric vehicles with Ola Electric, and most recently declared that his next frontier would be artificial intelligence. In December 2023, Krutrim AI emerged from stealth with a valuation that immediately placed it in unicorn territory — a remarkable achievement for a company that had barely existed for twelve months. But Krutrim's ambitions are even larger than its valuation suggests.
What Is Krutrim?
Krutrim — the name derives from the Sanskrit word for "artificial" — is positioning itself as India's full-stack AI company. Unlike startups that build applications on top of existing models from OpenAI or Anthropic, Krutrim is building its own foundational large language model, its own AI cloud infrastructure, and its own suite of consumer and enterprise applications. Aggarwal has described this vertical integration as essential: "If India doesn't build its own AI stack, we will always be dependent on foreign technology for the most critical layer of our digital economy."
The Model: Krutrim and Krutrim Pro
Krutrim's first model, simply called Krutrim, was trained on a corpus that the company claims includes more Indian-language data than any other model in existence — over two trillion tokens of text spanning 22 Indian languages. Early benchmarks showed the model performing competitively with GPT-3.5 on Indian-language tasks, though it lagged on English-language reasoning benchmarks. Krutrim Pro, the more powerful variant announced in early 2024, targets enterprise customers and aims to compete with GPT-4-class models on complex reasoning tasks in Indian languages.
The Cloud Play: Krutrim Cloud
Perhaps more significant than the models themselves is Krutrim's infrastructure ambition. The company announced plans to build Krutrim Cloud — a GPU cloud platform targeting Indian developers and enterprises who currently rely on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure for AI compute. With the Indian government pushing for domestic AI infrastructure under the AI Mission, Krutrim is positioning itself to become the preferred cloud provider for AI workloads in India. The company has committed to deploying over 100,000 GPUs across Indian data centres, a capital-intensive bet that signals long-term infrastructure intent.
The Controversy and the Opportunity
Krutrim has not been without controversy. Early reviews of its chatbot product found it prone to hallucinations on factual queries, and some AI researchers questioned whether the model's capabilities justified its unicorn valuation. Aggarwal has acknowledged that the product is early-stage and that the real differentiation will emerge over the next two to three years as training data, model architecture, and fine-tuning improve. The opportunity, however, is undeniable. India's AI software market is projected to reach $17 billion by 2027. If Krutrim can establish itself as the default Indian AI platform — for both cloud infrastructure and consumer applications — the long-term prize is enormous.