Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal is doubling down on Krutrim, Ola’s AI venture, by investing ₹2,000 crore into the business, with plans to scale up to ₹10,000 crore by next year.
- So far it is unclear if that capital is his own or comes from Ola’s coffers.
Nonetheless, it is one of the boldest moves coming from India, as the U.S. and China both scale investments into frontier models.
The details: Krutrim will launch a frontier AI lab, roll out Krutrim 2, and will work on expanding into vision, speech, and text translation models, all while keeping the technology designed for local Indian cultural context and languages.
Additionally, Krutrim will work with Nvidia to offer the GB200 chips in India, starting March 2025 — in of the firsts to bring the state of the art processor to market locally. The GPUs will be available through Krutrim cloud.
FYI, Krutrim had previously raised $50 million at a $1 billion valuation, making it India’s first AI unicorn in 2024.
Too little, too late? Open AI had a multi-year head start, and tens of billions invested, now scaling to hundreds. The Chinese are leading in their own way, innovating with limited resources amidst tight export restrictions of chips by the Americans.
Frankly speaking, ₹2,000 crores (~$230 million) may not be enough to catch speed. But, it is $230 mill more than we had 2 days ago chasing this opportunity, and could be critical in jump starting innovation on already available open-source technology. We'll take it.
Mr. Market liked the news—Ola’s stock popped 2.3%.
