Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal announces Rs 2,000-crore investment in Krutrim; unveils an AI lab

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal on February 4 announced an investment of Rs 2,000 crore in his artificial intelligence venture Krutrim, with a commitment of Rs 10,000 crore by next year, as the AI race intensifies.

Aggarwal also announced Krutrim AI lab, a frontier artificial intelligence research lab. He unveiled the next major version of its Krutrim large language model, Krutrim 2, along with a slew of AI models, including a vision language model, speech language model and text-to-text translation model.

“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 on Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context, etc,” Aggarwal said in a post on the X platform.

He also announced deployment of India’s first GB200 in partnership with Nvidia, which is expected to go live by March. “We will make it the largest supercomputer in India by end of year,” he said.

“We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in 1 year. And by open sourcing our models, we hope the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world class Indian AI ecosystem,” He said.

The announcement comes just days after Aggarwal said that Krutrim has deployed DeepSeek’s advanced AI models on its domestic servers, a move aimed to enhance data privacy and to reduce the cost of training AI models.

Krutrim, which means ‘artificial’ in Sanskrit, is focusing on building the entire AI computing stack. Aggarwal had said that it will operate as a separate company within the Ola Group, similar to the IPO-bound Ola Electric and its cab business.

Krutrim launched AI cloud services, called Krutrim Cloud, to help developers and enterprises access advanced GPU resources to accelerate their projects and improve productivity later today.

As part of this offering, Krutrim will offer access to “state-of-the-art” GPU hardware that provides superior performance for intensive computing tasks like AI training, 3D rendering, and scientific simulations.

Krutrim was launched by Ola founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal in 2023 and it announced that it has raised $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion, making it the first startup unicorn in the country in 2024.

Matrix Partners India, an early backer of Aggarwal’s other ventures Ola Cabs and the IPO-bound Ola Electric, led the funding round.