companies

Krutrim

India's first AI unicorn, built by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal to develop Indian-language models, now sells GPU cloud and AI infrastructure instead of chasing frontier LLMs.

Krutrim was founded in 2023 by Bhavish Aggarwal, the entrepreneur behind ride-hailing company Ola, with a mandate to build large language models tuned to India's linguistic diversity. The name comes from the Sanskrit word for "artificial," and the company's early work centered on Krutrim-1 and Krutrim-2, multilingual models trained to handle Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bangla and other Indian languages alongside English. In January 2024, Krutrim raised a Series A round led by Matrix Partners India (now Z47) with participation from the Sarin family, reaching a $1 billion valuation within months of its founding — the fastest unicorn run of any Indian startup at the time. Aggarwal has since committed significant personal capital to the venture as part of a broader push to build AI compute capacity inside India. By 2025, the company pulled back from its foundation-model and custom-chip ambitions and shifted its center of gravity toward Krutrim Cloud, a GPU infrastructure and AI hosting business aimed at Indian enterprises that need in-country data residency. The pivot came with layoffs and the shutdown of its Kruti consumer assistant, but Krutrim has reported its first profitable quarter on cloud revenue that roughly tripled year over year.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Bengaluru, India

Sector

infrastructure