The CEO of Ola, Bhavish Aggarwal announced investment into his new venture Krutrim at the staggering figure of ₹2,000 crores which he says would focus on artificial intelligence that specifically targets users from India, creating an impressive breakthrough for technological innovation in India.

bhavish aggarwal launches krutrim ai labs

Source: News8Live

Dedicated Towards AI Research

Aggarwal’s initial investment forms part of a larger commitment to invest up to ₹10,000 crore by next year. He will focus much more of the funding on building out the Krutrim AI Lab, which promises to be a frontier center for next-gen AI research and development in India. The lab will target key pain points in Indic languages, data scarcity, and cultural context, areas that have oft made it challenging to use AI effectively in the Indian market.

Open Source Initiatives

Krutrim will also make its work open source, thus encouraging collaboration and innovation. The models being launched include:

  • Krutrim 2: An upgraded version of the large language model.
  • Chitrarth 1: A vision language model.
  • Dhwani 1: A speech language model.
  • Vyakhyarth 1: An Indic embedding model.
  • Krutrim Translate 1: A text-to-text translation model.

In addition, Krutrim will introduce BharatBench, a benchmark designed to measure AI performance in Indic languages, thus contributing to the development of localized AI solutions.

Building India’s AI Supercomputer

As part of its ambitious plans, Krutrim is working in association with NVIDIA to design and develop India’s first GB200 AI supercomputer, which will be available by March. This will be India’s largest AI supercomputer by the end of the year, thereby increasing India’s ability to handle bigger AI computational and research tasks.

Data Privacy Enhancement

Aggarwal has been stressing the need for deploying AI models on local servers to ensure better data privacy. This, in turn, not only saves user data but also cuts down the cost of training AI models, thereby making the technology more accessible to developers and enterprises in India.

Previous Achievements and Future Aspirations

This investment comes after a successful round by Krutrim where the company has raised about $75 million and became a unicorn in early 2024. Some of the prominent investors are Matrix Partners India and the Sarin Family, which depicts great confidence in the AI vision that Aggarwal has for India.

While India is growing at lightning speeds, Aggarwal still finds that India has a long way to go in regards to AI. In order to help facilitate collaboration within the tech community and eventually help create a vibrant and innovative AI ecosystem for the country, Krutrim has taken its AI models open source.

In summary, Bhavish Aggarwal’s announcement of a ₹2,000 crore investment in Krutrim AI Labs marks an important milestone in AI development in India. Focusing on local languages and context, with plans for major infrastructure like the GB200 AI supercomputer, Krutrim is ideally placed to lead the way in making AI more relevant and impactful for Indian users. As the initiative gathers momentum, it promises to add significantly to India’s position in the global AI landscape.