Krutrim, the AI startup created by serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, has now become a unicorn, and this was achieved after securing $50 million from leading investors, including Matrix Partners India. The company was recently celebrated as the first Indian AI startup to become a billion-dollar unicorn, apparent valuation achieved within one month of launching its large language model.
Therefore, Krutrim (literally meaning artificial in Sanskrit) the startup is not only concentrating on improving AI language talents but also searching for developing data centres. The end goal is to design types of servers and supercomputers that meet the emerging needs in the AI ecosystem.
Krutrim is a family of Large Language Models, such as the upcoming multimodal krutrim base and krutrim pro, which will have more knowledge capabilities and many other futuristic features inference. As stated in the company’s blog post, it is trained on over 2 trillion tokens, and Krutrim outperforms other well-known global LLM evaluation benchmarks such as MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA, and ARC at various points.
In February 2024, consumers will have an opportunity to use the beta version of Krutrim. Moreover, it will be offered as an API for businesses and developers desiring to develop AI applications.
It follows that the race to build Indic LLMs for large language models has attracted several Indian startups and academic groups. The boom in interest was initiated by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT over one year ago. This drive is driven by the idea of setting up native AI systems, thereby reducing dependence on American or Chinese technologies.
Mistral AI, a French startup worth $ 2 billion after setting off last year, is getting funds from investors in the European landscape. Likewise, the UAE has its Falcon model endorsed by a government research institute in Abu Dhabi.
For its part, India is pursuing a strategy of creating smaller and cheaper AI systems. OpenHathi is the first open-source Hindi LLM launched by Sarvam, a generative AI company. This act closely followed a significant $41 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla and others.
Bhavish Aggarwal, famous for founding the Indian ride-hailing giant Ola is an advocate of India’s need to build its own AI capabilities. He stated, “We are fully dedicated to putting up the nation’s first integrated AI computing stack.”
Avnish Bajaj, Founder, and MD, Matrix Partners India, said: ‘Bhavish has always brought disruptive tech innovation to India at scale with Ola and Ola Electric – now excitingly with Krutrim to power the journey of ‘Viksit Bharat’ digitally.
