Bhavish Aggarwal, the creator of Ola, launched the AI unicorn Krutrim, which recently announced that it has raised a $1 billion fundraising round. According to a press release, the firm, which was established a year ago, became a unicorn in India the quickest. It added that it’s the first AI startup in India to reach unicorn status.

The $50 million “first round” in Krutrim was headed by Matrix Partners India, which has previously supported Aggarwal’s other two firms, the EV startup Ola Electric and the ride-hailing platform Ola. Aggarwal was in talks to fund $50 million for his new AI business, according to a TechCrunch report from the previous year.

The Sanskrit word for “artificial,” Krutrim, is constructing a big language model that has been trained not only in English but also in regional Indian languages. According to the business, it intends to release a voice-activated conversational AI assistant that speaks and understands several Indian languages.

Next month, it intends to release a beta version of its self-titled chatbot to users. Developers and businesses will then be the first to receive APIs. According to Krutrim’s website, the company also intends to create an internal capacity for producing chips that are optimized for AI computation.

Aggarwal’s third endeavor is called Krutrim. His first venture, Ola, is aiming for profitability and now leads the Indian ride-hailing market. Leading the two-wheeler electric vehicle (EV) sector in India, Ola Electric has submitted the necessary documentation for a $662 million IPO.

Aggarwal stated in a statement, “India has to build its own AI, and, we are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack.” “We are delighted to announce the successful completion of our first funding round, which highlights investors’ confidence in our ability to bring about significant change from India for the world while also validating the potential of कृत्रिम’s innovative AI solutions.”

The Krutrim investment comes at a time when investors around the world are scrambling to find and support AI breakthroughs, betting on the idea that innovations in the field would boost productivity across a wide range of industries and that cutting-edge firms could yield generational returns.

India is home to one of the biggest startup ecosystems globally, but it hasn’t made much of an effect in the battle for artificial intelligence yet. Indian competitors to the massive language model behemoths like Google’s Bard, Amazon-backed Anthropic, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have not yet surfaced.

Powerhouse Reliance of India announced a partnership with Nvidia in September, announcing aspirations to develop a huge language model based on the variety of languages spoken in India. However, the company, which is led by Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has not yet introduced its AI product.

Sarvam is an AI firm that is developing a huge language model. Recently, it received backing from Peak XV and Lightspeed India.

It has shown to be an extremely costly undertaking to train a big language model. In comparison, Anthropic has also raised billions from investors such as Google and Amazon, while OpenAI has raised more than $11 billion so far. According to a Financial Times story published on Friday, Elon Musk’s AI business xAI is in negotiations to raise to $6 billion at a valuation of roughly $20 billion.

SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/26/ola-founder-ai-startup-krutrim-unicorn-in-50m-funding/?