Krutrim: India’s First $1B AI Startup & Bhavish Aggarwal’s $50M Breakthrough

Krutrim AI was established in 2023, and its name originated from the Sanskrit word for “artificial.” It is India’s first $1B AI startup, founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, and is well-known for establishing Ola, a leading mobility platform. While global AI giants dominate with English-centric models, Krutrim is pioneering indigenous, culturally contextual AI systems designed to empower India’s non-English-speaking majority, which makes up nearly 90% of the population.

Krutrim AI’s primary mission is based on the belief that AI should reflect the soul of the society it serves. Its mission is to democratize AI technology by making it accessible and relevant to India’s diverse population. Krutrim AI understands all 22 of India’s officially recognized languages, bridging gaps left by global AI models.

The Founding Story of India’s First $1B AI startup company

The origin of Krutrim AI could be traced to the imaginative mind of Bhavish Aggarwal, a well-known entrepreneur who transformed India’s transportation system with Ola. Aggarwal shifted his attention to a new area, artificial intelligence, after more than ten years of growing Ola into a significant worldwide transportation services company. His motivation came from the vast gap he saw during India’s digital revolution: Although millions connected online, linguistic and cultural obstacles prevented large portions of individuals from using AI-powered services. Global AI models tuned for English and Western settings found understanding India’s sociocultural complexities, regional idioms, and linguistic variety challenging.

In 2021, Aggarwal founded Turing Labs to develop an AI built from the ground up using Indian data. The company was rebranded as Krutrim in 2023. Krutrim’s AI algorithm was trained on an unprecedented 2.4 trillion tokens of Indian data, encompassing text, conversations, and images.

Krutrim has been designed to understand over 20 major Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and more. Additionally, Krutrim can generate human-like text responses in 10 major regional languages, enabling it to power conversational AI applications. The base version of Krutrim is already being utilized to create chatbots, digital assistants, customer support bots, and more.

In October 2024, Krutrim raised $24 million in debt funding from Matrix Partners. In January 2025, Krutrim raised $50 million, reaching a valuation of $1 billion, and became India’s first $1B AI startup company, making it India’s first unicorn startup of 2024. It is also the first domestically developed artificial intelligence company to reach this level. Ola Electric’s Bhavish Aggarwal founded the AI firm, and the capital was raised from investors led by the venture capital fund Matrix Partners India.

“Entrepreneurs are not driven by fear; they are driven by the idea to create impact,” Said co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal.

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What challenges and obstacles did Krutrim AI face before becoming India’s first $1B AI startup?

Krutrim AI is making significant progress in developing AI solutions and has become India’s first $1B AI startup, achieving unicorn status. However, it still faces several challenges that must be addressed to ensure future success:

Data Confidentiality and Privacy

It faces the challenge of balancing the need for a large amount of data to train AI models with strict privacy law requirements. While maintaining AI functionality and protecting user data, Krutrim AI must abide by the Personal Data Protection Bill and the National Cyber Security Framework. 

Sensitivity to Language and Culture:

While Krutrim is focused on Indian languages, its AI still struggles with deep cultural and contextual accuracy, like voice-based AIs’ understanding of regional idioms, slang, and accents.

Innovation Challenges:

Early AI systems often struggled with unexpected human interaction, ill-conceived algorithms, and insufficient training data. Some initial speculation on Krutrim AI didn’t help, showing that more research and development of AI algorithms were needed.

Aspects of Ethics and Regulation:

As India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology mandates that AI systems be used responsibly and accountably, Krutrim AI must adhere to these regulatory guidelines to construct a trusted AI system.

Competition and Market Adoption

Krutrim AI should use its extensive knowledge of several languages and markets to pinpoint operational domains where multinational global giants find it challenging to stand out. Its capacity to effectively manage customer expectations and produce measurable results determines its success in the mass market.

Growth and Milestones

Launched by Bhavish Aggarwal in April 2023, Krutrim AI has soared in the Indian AI market, becoming India’s first $1B AI startup. Here is a summary of its emergence and key milestones

Key Milestones

• October 2023: In the initial phase of Krutrim AI, the company raised $24 million in capital.
• January 2024: Krutrim AI raised $50 million, was valued as India’s first $1B AI startup, and became India’s first AI unicorn
• February 2024: The company announced a multilingual AI assistant capable of creating content in 10 languages, including Bengali, Tamil, and Hindu, and proficient across 22 Indian languages.
• August 2024: Krutrim AI intends to develop a new generation of AI-optimized chips that will power its Infrastructure, services, and Krutrim Cloud.

How has the startup impacted customers and the industry?

Impact on Customers

1. Multilingual Support and Cultural Nuance:

Considering India’s linguistic diversity, Krutrim AI supports more than 20 official languages and multiple dialects. It also maintains cultural nuances, boosts authenticity, and cuts communication barriers.

2. Accessible AI for All:

Because Krutrim AI is designed with a simple natural language interface, people from diverse backgrounds, including underrepresented communities, can easily use the AI technology.

3. Continual Improvement through Feedback:

Krutrim AI utilizes user feedback from its beta program. This feedback mechanism works every week to improve the AI models and helps the organization be committed to fixing problems like hallucinations.

Impact on the Industry

1. Innovation and Global Recognition as India’s first $1B AI startup

As India’s first $1B AI startup, Krutrim AI’s success will make the country a strong competitor in the global AI space. Breaking away from traditions, this company is developing AI models with a special focus on Indian Languages and, hence, considering new innovative approaches and possibilities for AI research.

2. Democratizing AI

Krutrim AI promotes a more accessible and diversified innovation ecosystem by utilizing AI in domains that digital giants typically ignore.

3. Technological Advancements

Collaborations with businesses such as Untether AI are intended to improve AI acceleration solutions, which could help several Indian industries.

Krutrim AI, India’s first $1B AI startup, is transforming the lives of businesses and individuals. Its focus on regional languages and local cultural contexts improves user engagement and functional interface. The company’s creative strategy and core mission to democratize AI technology in the sector are experiencing a paradigm shift worldwide. With continuous research and development, Krutrim AI will advance Indian technology and development into several sectors.

Awards and Recognitions

1. India’s first $1B AI Startup

In January 2024, Krutrim AI became the first AI unicorn in India. It marked a milestone when Matrix Partners India headed the transaction to get finances worth $50 million and valued the company at $1 billion, thus paving the way for India’s first $1 Billion AI startup.

2. Fastest Indian Startup to Reach Unicorn Status

Krutrim AI is recognized as the fastest Indian startup to achieve unicorn status, reaching this milestone within a year of its inception.

3. Launch of Krutim-2 Language Model

In February 2025, the business unveiled Krutrim-2, a multilingual large language model with 12 billion parameters that are tuned for 22 Indian languages along with English. Krutrim-2 is a significant step forward in the company’s goal to develop an AI model for India, outperforming models five to ten times its size to achieve outstanding results on Indian tasks.

4. Development of BharatBench

In response to the demand for defined performance criteria, Krutrim AI created BharatBench, a benchmarking platform to assess AI models in Indian contexts.

Future Plans

As India’s first $1 billion AI startup, Krutrim AI has set ambitious goals to become the leader in the country’s AI market.

1. AI Chip Development

Krutrim AI aims to design and launch India’s first AI silicon chips by 2026. Additionally, by 2028, the company intends to produce Bodhi 2, which will be scalable to exascale supercomputing capabilities and trained on over 10 trillion parameters.

2. Cloud Services

To supplement chip work, Krutrim is developing a few cloud-specific offerings concentrating on data platforms, infrastructure, developer tools, AI models, and AI-oriented applications.

3. Strategic Partnerships:

Krutrim has partnered with two global tech leaders, Arm and Untether AI, to create the next generation of AI acceleration. These alliances will help Krutrim to occupy its position within the confines of silicon technology trends.

4. Supercomputing

Krutrim is working on building India’s largest supercomputer in collaboration with Nvidia by the end of 2025.

Conclusion

Krutrim is not only recognized as India’s first $1B AI startup but also for its creativity, strength, and vision. Whether through creative AI solutions, dedication to quality, or audacious vision, Krutrim is building the future of the AI revolution. With a significant split in the data training of AI up to the point of October 2023, the company is paving the way for the future where society and industry have a significant effect. There will be a lot of exciting possibilities for the future, and it will be interesting to see how Krutrim keeps pushing the boundaries of technology and transforming society.

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