Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal has become only the second Indian behind three unicorns after his artificial intelligence startup Krutrim raised $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion.
The funding round was led by Matrix Partners India, with some other investors participating.
The startup, which was launched in April last year, has also become the fastest to claim the unicorn tag and India’s first AI company to attain unicorn status.
Krutrim said it will use the funds to drive innovation and expand its reach globally.
“India has to build its own AI, and at Krutim, we are fully committed to building the country’s first complete AI computing stack,” said Aggarwal.
Krutrim released its base large language model (LLM) last month. The company claims that with the largest representation of Indian data used for its training, it powers generative AI applications for all Indian languages.
The LLM platform is said to be trained by a team of computer scientists based in Bangalore and San Francisco. This model will also power Krutrim’s conversational AI assistant which understands and speaks multiple Indian languages fluently, the company said.
“Bhavish has consistently brought cutting-edge tech innovation to India at scale with Ola and Ola Electric - and now excitingly with Krutrim…,” said Avnish Bajaj, founder and managing director at Matrix Partners India.
Besides Aggarwal, the only other Indian behind three unicorns is Supam Maheshwari. He co-founded omnichannel retailer for baby and kids’ products FirstCry, logistics firm XpressBees and e-commerce roll-up platform GlobalBees.
