Can Bhavish Aggarwal Drag Ola Krutrim Out Of The Rut?

Ola Krutrim has pivoted from sovereign AI ambitions to AI cloud infrastructure after an up-and-down existence

The startup saw major churn, including senior exits, layoffs and a workforce drop from 550 employees to nearly 150-160 within months

Ambitious plans across LLMs, chips, cloud and AI assistants have all been put aside as the company turns its focus to cloud services

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In June 2023, on a visit to India, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman said Indian startups looking to build ChatGPT rivals with just a few million dollars will most likely fail. Ola Consumer and Ola Electric founder Bhavish Aggarwal responded saying an Indian company will one day prove him wrong. 

Aggarwal, who has openly criticised tech giants in the past, rejected the idea that India could not build foundational AI models that ChatGPT relied on. 

In the following weeks and months, Aggarwal set about incorporating Ola Krutrim, raised funds from long-time Ola investor Matrix (now Z47) and positioned it as India’s own sovereign LLM. Krutrim became a unicorn almost exactly one year after Altman had said Indian startups could not compete. 

In early 2024, the startup raised $50 Mn in funding at a $1Bn valuation to become the third unicorn under Aggarwal’s belt. 

Aggarwal is usually bullish about every new launch in the Ola family, but many would say that Ola Krutrim was his grandest vision. 

He spoke assuredly about building India centric AI models trained on local languages and datasets. The startup even announced plans for launching indigenous AI chip, its own cloud stack, and also unveiled consumer AI assistants, and marketed itself as a full stack AI ecosystem. Even if some of these claims had been called out by many, including us, at the time. 

But less than two years later, as things stand, much of that original vision appears to have unravelled. 

Krutrim has paused work on its ambitious LLM and semiconductor initiatives, recently pulled the plug on its consumer chatbot Kruti, and has seen several senior level exits. 

Sources say that the company has........

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