Krutrim, an Indian AI startup, has secured a substantial $230 million investment from Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola, signaling a significant boost for the company’s ambitious projects. The funding, primarily sourced from Aggarwal’s family office, aims to propel Krutrim towards its goal of attracting $1.15 billion in investments by next year. This move comes as Krutrim’s cloud arm began offering its AI model, DeepSeek, on Indian servers last week.
The startup has made impressive strides in AI technology, particularly with its launch of Krutrim-2, a 12-billion parameter language model designed to excel in processing Indian languages. The model demonstrates outstanding capabilities, achieving a 0.98 score in grammar correction and a 0.91 score in multi-turn conversations. In sentiment analysis tests, Krutrim outperformed competing models with a score of 0.95 compared to 0.70. Moreover, the startup reported an 80% success rate in code generation tasks.
Krutrim's technical approach involves the use of a 128,000-token context window, enabling its systems to handle longer texts and more intricate conversations. The company has also developed BharatBench, an evaluation framework to assess AI models' proficiency in Indian languages. This innovation aligns with India's recent commendation of DeepSeek's progress and its decision to host the lab's large language models on domestic servers.
The startup's commitment to open-sourcing specialized models further underscores its dedication to advancing AI technology tailored for Indian languages. These models include systems for image processing, speech translation, and text search. Furthermore, Krutrim's release of a "reasoning" model has caused a stir within the tech industry due to its development on a reportedly modest budget.
In partnership with Nvidia, Krutrim is constructing what it claims will be India's largest supercomputer, slated for deployment in March. This undertaking is expected to significantly bolster the nation's computational capabilities and support Krutrim's cutting-edge research.
“We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in one year,”
— Bhavish Aggarwal
Aggarwal's statement reflects the startup's rapid advancements while acknowledging the challenges ahead. His investment signifies confidence in Krutrim's potential to elevate India's standing in the global AI landscape.
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