Krutrim Launches India’s First Frontier Research AI Lab to Democratise AI Innovation; Commits Investment of $1.2 Billion by Next Year

• Announces investment of $230 million (equity and debt) today
• Releases Krutrim-2 12B,- best-in-class large language model for Indic
• Open Sources 6 new state-of-the-art Indic AI models across text, voice and speech to enhance AI adoption in India
• Develops “BharatBench” as the global benchmark for evaluation performance of AI models on Indic tasks
• Announces deployment of India’s first and most advanced GB 200 supercluster in partnership with NVIDIA

Krutrim, India’s first AI unicorn, today announced the launch of Krutrim AI Lab, the country’s first AI frontier research lab. This pioneering initiative is set to make AI research accessible, attract the best talent, and establish India as a global leader in open-source AI. As AI transforms industries worldwide, Krutrim AI Lab takes a step towards creating state-of-the-art AI infrastructure, supporting the research and developer community, and building cutting-edge AI models tailored for Indic languages and real-world applications.

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Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder, Krutrim (Photo: Business Wire)

In line with building its growth roadmap, Krutrim announced an investment of $230 million today (equity and debt) with a commitment of $1.2 billion by next year. Krutrim also strengthens its global collaborations, by announcing India’s first GB200 cluster deployment along with NVIDIA scheduled to go live by March 2025. Krutrim aims to build India’s largest supercomputer in India by the end of the year.

Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder, Krutrim said, “With Krutrim, our vision is to develop AI for India and make it better for Indian languages, data scarcity and cultural context. While we are behind global benchmarks, we have made good progress in the last year. With Krutrim AI Lab, we hope that the entire Indian AI community collaborates to create a world-class Indian AI ecosystem.”

Krutrim AI Lab champions open-source AI and democratises AI innovation by fostering collaboration with academia, startups, and developers. It deploys state-of-the-art computing resources to accelerate AI capabilities. With its multilingual AI models that represent India’s diverse linguistic landscape, Krutrim AI Lab ensures equitable access to AI across all Indian languages. By creating AI solutions optimised for scale and affordability, the research lab enables cost-efficient AI innovation and attracts top talent that pushes the boundaries of AI knowledge.

Krutrim has open sourced new state-of-the-art Indic AI models to enhance AI adoption in India:

• Krutrim-2 and Krutrim-1 LLMs: The Krutrim 1 7B model (India’s first LLM) was launched in January 2024. Krutrim 2, launched today, is an improved model. More information here: https://tech.olakrutrim.com/krutrim-2-a-best-in-class-large-language-model-for-indic-languages/
• Chitrarth 1: India’s first Vision Language Model built on top of Krutrim-1, is capable of understanding images and documents. Additional information here: https://ai-labs.olakrutrim.com/models/Chitrarth-1
• Dhwani 1: India’s first Speech Language Model, built on top of Krutrim-1, is capable of undertaking tasks like speech translations. More information here: https://ai-labs.olakrutrim.com/models/Dhwani-1
• Vyakhyarth 1: State-of-the-art (SoTA) Indic Embedding model for use cases like Search and RAG. More information here: https://ai-labs.olakrutrim.com/models/Vyakyarth-1-Indic-Embedding
• Krutrim Translate 1: State-of-the-art (SoTA) Text-to-text translation model. More information here: https://ai-labs.olakrutrim.com/models/Krutrim-Translate

Additionally, Krutrim develops ‘BharatBench’ as the global benchmark for Indic performance. More information in the technical report is here: https://tech.olakrutrim.com/bharat-bench/

Krutrim AI Lab focuses on critical AI research domains essential for digital transformation and development of India’s first large-scale AI models, capable of competing globally. The multimodal Lab is aimed at building AI that understands and processes text, speech, and visuals across multiple languages. It also addresses India’s data scarcity challenge by digitising knowledge artefacts and creating high-quality datasets. Additionally, by incorporating AI on a real-world scale, Krutrim AI Lab ensures AI systems that are efficient and adaptable to India’s high-volume, resource-constrained environments.

To supercharge innovation in India, Krutrim previously announced over 50 new services on Krutrim cloud making it ready for most applications needed by Indian developers. The infrastructure services include Virtual Machines (VMs), cloud storage, state-of-the-art security measures for data protection and cutting-edge observability features for precise data monitoring. Additionally, the AI cloud services announced were AI Pods to enable low-cost access to best-in-class GPUs, AI studio for building compound AI applications, model catalogue with latest LLMs and vision models, and now code/low code training, finetuning, inference and model evaluation capabilities.

To support the company’s ambitious AI and cloud initiatives, Krutrim also announced its plans to scale up its data centre capacity to a massive 1 GW by 2028. The data centre will be a computing and data storage powerhouse, enabling Krutrim to offer world-class AI services to India and the world.

About Krutrim

Krutrim, a part of the Ola group, is working on creating the AI computing stack of the future. We endeavor to deliver a state-of-the-art AI computing stack that encompasses the AI computing infrastructure, AI Cloud, foundational models, and AI-powered end applications for the Indian market. Our envisioned AI computing stack can empower consumers, startups, enterprises and scientists across India and the world to build their end AI applications or AI models. While we are building foundational models across text, voice, and vision relevant to our focus markets, we are also developing AI training and inference platforms that enable AI research and development across industry domains. The platforms being built by Krutrim have the potential to impact millions of lives in India, across income and education strata, and across languages. The team at Krutrim represents a convergence of talent across AI research, Applied AI, Cloud Engineering, and semiconductor design. Our teams operate from three locations: Bengaluru, Singapore & San Francisco.

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