Bhavish Aggarwal's $230 Million Investment in Krutrim Signals India's AI Ambitions

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal is making headlines with his bold investment of $230 million into Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup he founded. This significant funding comes as India seeks to carve out a place in the competitive AI landscape currently dominated by U.S. and Chinese firms. Aggarwal's investment is primarily facilitated through his family office, with plans to attract a total of $1.15 billion for Krutrim by next year, sourcing the remaining capital from external investors.

The announcement of this funding coincides with Krutrim's strategic move to open-source its AI models and its ambitious plans to develop what it claims will be India's largest supercomputer in collaboration with Nvidia. The recently released Krutrim-2 model boasts 12 billion parameters and has demonstrated impressive capabilities in processing Indian languages. In sentiment analysis tests, it achieved a score of 0.95 compared to 0.70 for competing models, alongside an 80% success rate in code generation tasks.

In his post on X (formerly Twitter), Aggarwal emphasized the importance of collaboration within the Indian AI community to foster a world-class ecosystem. "We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in one year," he stated. By making their models open-source, Krutrim aims to encourage collective innovation among Indian developers and researchers.

Krutrim has also introduced BharatBench, an evaluation framework designed specifically for assessing AI models' proficiency in Indian languages. This initiative addresses the existing gap in benchmarks that predominantly focus on English and Chinese languages. The company's technical approach includes utilizing a 128,000-token context window, enabling its systems to manage longer texts and more intricate conversations effectively.

The timing of this investment is crucial as India positions itself as a significant player in the global AI arena. Following the recent advancements by DeepSeek, another Indian AI firm that has gained attention for its reasoning model built on a modest budget, Krutrim's initiatives are poised to further elevate India's status in the tech industry.

With the deployment of its supercomputer scheduled for March and plans for expansion throughout the year, Krutrim is set to play a pivotal role in shaping India's AI landscape. The startup's journey reflects a broader trend of increasing interest and investment in artificial intelligence across the country, driven by the potential for innovation and economic growth.