Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal is investing $230 million into his AI startup Krutrim, aiming to position India in the global AI race dominated by the U.S. and China. The investment comes primarily from his family office, with plans to raise an additional $1.15 billion by next year from external investors.

Krutrim’s AI Models Go Open Source

Krutrim has made its AI models open source and announced plans to build India’s largest supercomputer in collaboration with Nvidia. The newly launched Krutrim-2 is a 12-billion parameter language model that demonstrates strong performance in Indian languages, surpassing competitors in sentiment analysis and code generation.

Advancing AI for Indian Languages

The lab has open-sourced specialized AI models for image processing, speech translation, and text search, all optimized for Indian languages. It also introduced BharatBench, an evaluation framework designed to assess AI proficiency in Indian languages, addressing gaps in existing global benchmarks.

India’s AI Push and Global Competition

India is strengthening its AI infrastructure, recently hosting DeepSeek’s large language models on domestic servers. Krutrim’s cloud arm began offering DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model last week. The company’s technical innovations include a 128,000-token context window, allowing for longer and more complex AI conversations.

Supercomputer Launch and Future Plans

Krutrim’s first large language model, Krutrim-1, launched in January with 7 billion parameters. The supercomputer, developed in partnership with Nvidia, is set to go live in March, with expansion planned throughout the year.