With the help of several investors, including Matrix Partners India, Bhavish Aggarwal's artificial intelligence business Krutrim SI Designs has announced that it has raised $50 million. With the fundraising, the startup became the fastest company to reach the $1 billion valuation and turned unicorn. Krutrim, the AI unicorn that makes its debut in India, is the first of 2024 and the third since January 2023. Zepto and InCred are the two unicorns that Indian minted last year.

It becomes the first Indian AI startup to gain a billion-dollar valuation, a mere month after debuting a large language model, the firm said in a blog post. Krutrim, which translates to “artificial" in Sanskrit, is also developing data centers and will ultimately aim to create servers and super computers for the AI ecosystem. With OpenAI's ChatGPT launch more than a year ago, a plethora of Indian entrepreneurs and academic institutions are racing to develop large language models in Indian languages, or so-called India LLMs. In instead of depending solely on technology from the US or China, nations are attempting to develop their own rival AI systems. Europe's investors are flooding Mistral AI, France, which was formed a year ago and is currently valued at $2 billion. The Falcon concept, supported by a Government research organization in Abu Dhabi, is highly promoted by the United Arab Emirates.

With the money, Krutrim AI hopes to revolutionise the AI industry by fostering innovation and broadening its influence internationally. The announcement of the successful closing of Krutrim's first funding round was made by Aggarwal in a statement. "We are thrilled to validate the potential of our innovative AI solutions but also underscore the confidence investors have in our ability to drive meaningful change out of India for the world," the statement read. The company raised $24 million in debt from Matrix Partners in October 2023. At the time, this platform was the only publication to report on the discovery. In April of this year, Tenneti Venugopala Krishnamurthy, a co-founder, helped in forming Krutrim SI Designs. Longstanding Board member of ANI Technologies, the parent firm of Ola, is Krishnamurthy.

There will be two versions of the AI model available: Krutrim and Krutrim Pro. While Krutrim Pro is a multi-modal model designed for enterprise application, the basic Krutrim model can understand 22 Indian languages and provide responses in 10 different languages. Apart from the two firms he started, Ola and Ola Electric, Bhavish Aggarwal is the founder of Krutrim, the third unicorn. Bhavish Aggarwal has joined forces with Supam Maheshari, who has founded three unicorns: FirstCry, GlobalBees, and XpressBees.