Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal to invest ₹2,000cr in Krutrim, rolls out AI lab

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola, on Tuesday, announced an investment of ₹2,000 Crore into its AI unicorn Krutrim, with a commitment of ₹10,000 Crore by next year.

The development comes as China's DeepSeek shook the AI market with its cost-effective yet powerful and open-source AI model. Last week, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also revealed that India will develop its generative AI model in less than a year.

Aggarwal also announced the roll out of a frontier artificial intelligence research lab, Krutrim AI lab, just days after Krutrim announced it is hosting open source AI models of Chinese GenAI company DeepSeek on its cloud platform.

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

In line with its open-source strategy, Krutrim is launching several AI models, including Krutrim 2, an enhanced large language model; Chitrarth 1, a Vision Language Model; Dhwani 1, a Speech Language Model; Vyakhyarth 1, an Indic embedding model; and Krutrim Translate 1, a text-to-text translation model. Furthermore, Krutrim has introduced BharatBench, a specialized benchmark for assessing the performance of Indic AI.

Additionally, Krutrim is collaborating with NVIDIA to construct India’s first GB200 AI supercomputer, which is anticipated to be operational by March and aims to become the largest AI supercomputer in India by the end of the year.

Aggarwal highlighted that despite the rapid progress made by Krutrim in just one year, there remains significant work to be done in the field of AI in India. By open-sourcing its models, the company aspires to foster collaboration and contribute to the development of a robust AI ecosystem in the country.

In December 2024, Aggarwal committed his Ola Electric shares to secure debt funding through debenture issuance for his AI venture, Krutrim SI Designs. To date, Krutrim has successfully raised approximately $75 million and achieved unicorn status in January of the previous year, with investors including Z47 (formerly Matrix), the Sarin Family, and others.