Bhavish Aggarwal is betting big on Krutrim, but the execution story is still a black box

Bhavish Aggarwal’s family office-backed Krutrim SI Designs Pvt. Ltd. has launched its consumer-focussed agentic AI, ‘Kruti’, an upgrade of its earlier beta version chatbot available on the Krutrim app. According to the company, the agentic AI is built with advanced reasoning and personalisation capabilities and is designed to provide a personal assistant-like experience to users. The AI assistant currently supports both text and voice input and can understand 13 Indian languages. It is capable of tasks such as ride booking, food ordering, and bill payments, and learns from user engagement to tailor its responses.

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of the company, said, “We have built Kruti to work the way Indians live: multilingual, mobile-first, and intuitive. It is deeply personal, incredibly capable, and ready to take everyday complexity off your plate.”

According to the company, Kruti has been built on the Krutrim V2 LLM and offers a fully embeddable SDK (Software Development Kit) for third-party platform developers to integrate. It also provides an image generator and action agents free of cost. In the coming days, Kruti will launch its enterprise platform, enabling companies to deploy and customise AI agents at scale.

In addition to the Krutrim V2 model, Kruti leverages proprietary data and open-source models. The company has deployed approximately 400–600 linguists working across 11–12 Indian languages to clean and prepare the data.

Navendu Aggarwal, Group CIO of Ola, said that Krutrim SI Designs—the company behind Kruti—employs around 1,000 people and follows a full-stack approach, with dedicated teams of approximately 200 members each across silicon, cloud, and AI. The agentic AI product is spearheaded by the AI team in close collaboration with the cloud division, with all models hosted on Krutrim’s own infrastructure. The company currently operates two in-house data centres. While the physical infrastructure is provided by cloud services firm CtrlS, Krutrim handles the hardware, software, and system integration independently.

The company has not disclosed its investment in the development of the LLM or the agentic AI. However, Bhavish Aggarwal noted that Krutrim currently has sufficient capital to fund its development. In February this year, he announced the launch of the Krutrim AI Lab via a post on X, with a focus on building AI for India. He also announced the deployment of NVIDIA’s GB200 in partnership with the company and said that the aim was to create the largest supercomputer in India by the end of the year, supported by ₹2,000 crore in funding and a commitment of ₹10,000 crore by next year.

Globally, cost optimisation has been a key driver behind enterprise-level adoption of generative and agentic AI tools. While big tech companies are leading the charge, IT services and consulting firms are also developing or co-developing agentic AI solutions or acquiring companies with such capabilities. However, in the case of Kruti, the adoption path—whether by individual users or enterprises—as well as its monetisation plans, remain unclear. According to the Google Play Store, Krutrim’s app has been downloaded just over 10,000 times since its release last year.

“We are an evolving company. We are building, and now this has started. This is the app that will go through an agentic journey and eventually reach millions of users,” said Navendu Aggarwal. While he did not provide any projected numbers, he added that the company was confident Kruti would see rapid adoption similar to ChatGPT within the next 2–3 years.

The company also stated, without offering specific figures, that it has worked on proof-of-concept projects and is in discussions with firms in the edtech and communications sectors.

Currently, four companies operate under the Krutrim umbrella, all incorporated in the past two years: Krutrim Silicon Private Limited, Krutrim Data Centre Private Limited, Krutrim Cloud Private Limited, and Krutrim SI Designs Pvt. Ltd. The holding company, Krutrim AI Design LLP, is majority-owned by Bhavish Aggarwal’s family office.

According to corporate filings, as of the end of March 2024, Krutrim SI Designs had a paid-up capital of ₹306.7 crore. Its shareholders include Krutrim AI Designs LLP (owned by the BA family office), Vindhyavasini Partners (represented by Amit Anchal, former Head of Strategy at Ola), Matrix Partners India IV AIF, Matrix Partners India Investments IV, LLC, Matrix Partners India Investments IV-A LLC, and Ola Electric board members Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti and Arun Sarin (through Sarin Family India). Tracxn data shows the company has raised a total of $51.1 million and claims a $1 billion valuation, giving it unicorn status.

According to BSE data, in the first half of FY25, Ola Electric Mobility Ltd. purchased goods and services or reimbursed expenses totalling nearly ₹30 crore to this promoter group private entity. It also has board approval to spend over ₹100 crore.

For FY25, Ola Electric Mobility reported a total income of ₹4,645 crore, compared to ₹5,126 crore in FY24, and has set targets to improve operating costs in its Auto segment. During the earnings call, Bhavish Aggarwal indicated that the company could achieve profitability once monthly vehicle sales reach around 25,000 units, which he expects in the second half of FY26.