Krutrim’s 2 trillion token LLM is India’s first AI unicorn

India's Bhavish Aggarwal who founded Ola and Ola Electric, launched Krutrim which is now India's very first artificial intelligence unicorn.

Started in April 2023, Krutrim translates to 'artificial' in Sanskrit, which is widely considered to be the mother language for the great diversity of Indian languages.

Krutrim's vision is to enable India to build its "first comprehensive AI computing stack" while the platform can support all 22 scheduled languages of the Indian constitution.

The bedrock of the company co-founded along with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tennetti, a board member of ANI Technologies, is an advanced Language Learning Model (LLM) upon which generative AI applications can be created in multiple Indian languages.

Krutrim's conversational AI assistant is capable of powering novel applications by fluently communicating in multiple Indian languages, and is built on the "largest representation of Indian data" of over 2 tn tokens for its model training purposes.

Significantly, from February 2024 onwards, it shall be available as an API for developers to create applications on top of the LLM.

Funding

Krutrim has raised $50 mn in equity at a valuation of $1 bn from marquee investors including Matrix Partners India.

Avinash Bajaj, MD and founder of Matrix Partners India hailed the startup for "powering the journey to a Viksit Bharat digitally."

Viksit Bharat represents India's vision to achieve developed country status by 2047, marking the 100-year anniversary of independence from Great Britain.

Aggarwal's Ola Electric, the EV manufacturer achieved unicorn status in 2019 as did Ola in 2015.

Parallelly, Krutrim is looking to build indigenous data centers.

Other Indian language AI companies

Sarvam AI, a generative AI startup recently launched a Hindi LLM known as OpenHathi and successfully raised $41 mn in its Series A from LightSpeed Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV Partners.

The company is seeking to develop a full-stack solution to train and customize AI models in India.

CoRover.ai is a conversational AI platform which "provides multilingual virtual assistants that enable users to interact by voice or text", in their own choice of language.

At present, the platform can support 14 Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Odiya, Tamil, and a mixture of conversational languages such as Hinglish or Bengalish; in addition to 120 foreign languages.

Its BharatGPT platform ensures that the data remains in India, responses are fine-tuned for Indian audiences, and the technology can be integrated into APIs and existing ERMs.

This vision is in line with the GoI's call to 'Make AI in India' and to 'Make AI work for India'.

As per the Business Standard, Sarvam AI is valued at $111 mn while CoRover.ai is valued at $8.5 mn.

The Government of India noted that The People's Linguistic Survey of India identified 780 languages in the country.

Since July 2017, the GoI has mandated that mobile phones "should support all Indian languages."