Artificial intelligence (AI) company Krutrim achieved the milestone of becoming the fastest unicorn in India and the country’s inaugural AI unicorn following the successful closure of its first funding round on Friday.
The funding, spearheaded by prominent investors including Matrix Partners India, amassed $50 million in equity, propelling Krutrim to a valuation of $1 billion.
The VC funds will play a pivotal role in advancing Krutrim’s mission to reshape the AI landscape, foster innovation, and extend its global footprint.
Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder of Krutrim and Ola, expressed a strong commitment to fostering indigenous AI development in India, stating, “India has to build its own AI, and we are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack.”
Avnish Bajaj, Founder and Managing Director of Matrix Partners India, expressed his privilege in deepening the partnership with Bhavish and Krutrim, underlining the significance of their collaboration.
Krutrim garnered attention last month by unveiling its base large language model (LLM), which utilizes the largest representation of Indian data for training. This LLM powers generative AI applications across all Indian languages, contributing to the company’s innovative approach to linguistic diversity.
Trained by a team of esteemed computer scientists based in Bengaluru and San Francisco, Krutrim’s model is set to drive its conversational AI assistant proficient in multiple Indian languages. Trained on a colossal dataset of over 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim’s model excels in various global LLM evaluation benchmarks, including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA, and ARC.
The Krutrim model boasts the unique capability to seamlessly switch between languages, engaging in discussions on diverse topics, from Bengali poetry to Bollywood movies and even creative masala dosa recipes.
Anticipated to be available in beta version for consumers in February 2024, Krutrim’s AI model will also serve as an Application Programming Interface (API) for enterprises and developers, providing a platform to create cutting-edge AI applications. The news of Krutrim’s unicorn status and successful funding round positions it as a prominent player in India’s burgeoning AI landscape.
