Krutrim, an AI business founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, the co-founder of Ola, has become a unicorn after raising $50 million from investors, including Matrix Partners India. In a blog post, the company announced that, just one month after launching a sizable language model, it has become the first AI startup in India to be valued at $1 billion. ‘Artificial’ in Sanskrit, Krutrim is building data centers to build servers and supercomputers for the AI ecosystem.
The news was made a few days after the billionaire Vinod Khosla, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and other investors contributed $41 million to the AI business.
Aggarwal, the founder, declared, “India needs to develop its own AI. Our goal is to construct the first full AI computing stack in the nation.
Competition Amongst Countries To Develop Their Own AI Systems
Large language models in Indian languages, or Indic LLMs, have been a race among several Indian firms and academic institutions ever since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the public more than a year ago. Several countries are aiming to develop their own rival AI systems rather than depending solely on US and Chinese technology. Indeed, in Europe, capital is flooding into Mistral AI, a $2 billion company that was created in France last year.
The Falcon model is being praised and actively promoted by the United Arab Emirates. A government research institute in Abu Dhabi supports the Falcon model.
India, a country of almost 1.4 billion people, is concentrating on developing more affordable, smaller AI systems. Only last month, the generative AI startup Sarvam released OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM. Notably, Sarvam used open-source models to build its system.
