Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal to invest ₹2,000cr in AI start-up Krutrim
What's the story
Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal has announced a whopping ₹2,000 crore investment in his AI start-up, Krutrim. He has also pledged another ₹10,000 crore for the project by next year.
The development comes as China's DeepSeek has rattled the AI market with its cost-effective yet powerful and open-source AI model.
Last week, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also revelead that India will develop its own generative AI model in less than a year.
AI advancements
Krutrim AI lab and new AI models launched
Along with the investment announcement, Aggarwal also introduced the Krutrim AI lab, a cutting-edge facility focused on artificial intelligence research.
He also announced an upgraded version of the Krutrim large language model, called Krutrim 2.
The launch was accompanied by a number of other AI models including a vision language model, speech language model, and text-to-text translation model.
Research focus
Krutrim's AI research targets Indian languages and data scarcity
Aggarwal emphasized that the team has been working on AI for a year and is now ready to share their findings with the open-source community.
He said, "Our focus is on developing AI for India — to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context, etc."
This highlights Krutrim's commitment toward improving AI capabilities specifically for Indian languages and data scarcity issues.
Tech collaboration
Ola and NVIDIA to deploy India's 1st GB200
In another major tech collaboration, Aggarwal announced that Ola will be partnering with NVIDIA to deploy India's first GB200.
The GB200 is a GPU card that is part of the NVIDIA Blackwell AI architecture. The advanced tech is expected to go live by March.
Aggarwal ambitiously said, "We will make it the largest supercomputer in India by end of year," hinting at his vision for this partnership and its potential impact on India's technological landscape.