Serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal's artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Krutrim, has attained unicorn status after securing $50 million in a successful funding round. This achievement comes through substantial investments from key backers, including Matrix Partners India.

In a recent blog post, the company proudly declared itself the first Indian AI startup to achieve a billion-dollar valuation. This noteworthy accomplishment was attained within a month of unveiling a substantial language model.

The startup named Krutrim, which translates to "artificial" in Sanskrit, is actively pursuing advancements in AI language capabilities while also venturing into the establishment of data centers. The overarching objective is to design servers and supercomputers specifically catered to the evolving requirements of the AI ecosystem.

Krutrim, a family of Large Language Models, comprising Krutrim Base and Krutrim Pro with enhanced multimodal and expanded knowledge capabilities, showcases several technical advancements for inference.

The company's blog post reveals that trained on over 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim exhibits superior performance on various globally recognized Large Language Model evaluation benchmarks, including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA, and ARC.

Scheduled for a beta release in February 2024, Krutrim will be accessible to consumers. Moreover, it will be offered as an API for enterprises and developers aiming to integrate the AI models into their applications.

The race for Indic LLMs is on, fueled by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Indian startups aim to reduce dependence on U.S. and Chinese tech. In Europe, Mistral AI, a French startup, has a $2 billion valuation. The UAE's Falcon model, backed by Abu Dhabi's government institute, adds to the global competition.

Meanwhile, as part of its strategy to develop smaller and cost-efficient AI systems, India's generative AI startup Sarvam has introduced OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi Large Language Model (LLM).

This move comes on the heels of a substantial $41 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla, and other backers, signaling a focused effort to advance AI technology within the country.

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal emphasizes the imperative for India to develop its AI capabilities, declaring a commitment to building the country's first complete AI computing stack with Krutrim. Matrix Partners India's Founder and MD, Avnish Bajaj, expresses excitement about deepening the partnership with Bhavish and Krutrim, citing their track record in bringing tech innovation to India at scale.

Image source: Business Today