Startup Deep Dive : Krutrim — how India’s fastest unicorn paused its LLM and chip plans to turn a profit

In January 2024, a four-month-old Indian company with almost no outside revenue was valued at $1 billion, making it the fastest startup in the country’s history to reach unicorn status. The company was Krutrim, founded by Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, and its pitch was audacious: build India’s own large language model, its own AI cloud, and its own AI chips, all inside one firm.

Two years on, the chips are paused, the consumer chatbot is shut, and the workforce has shrunk by more than two-thirds. Yet in the same stretch, Krutrim says it tripled its revenue and booked its first annual profit — by quietly becoming something far less glamorous than a sovereign AI lab: an enterprise cloud vendor.

Quick facts

What they do

Krutrim today sells AI cloud infrastructure to Indian enterprises: GPU compute, storage, virtual machines and a growing set of enterprise AI tools, delivered from its own data centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. As per company statements reported in May 2026, its customer list has grown to more than 25 large organisations spanning telecom, banking and financial services, consumer internet, healthcare, logistics and other deep-tech firms. That is a narrower business than the one Krutrim announced at birth. It still maintains Krutrim Maps and a family of large language models under the Krutrim-1 and Krutrim-2 names, some of them open-sourced, but the consumer chatbot built on top of them, called Kruti, has since been discontinued as the company reoriented around business customers rather than end consumers.

The origin

Bhavish Aggarwal is not a first-time founder. An IIT Bombay computer engineering graduate who worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research India, he co-founded Ola Cabs in January 2011 with Ankit Bhati, and later built Ola Electric into India’s largest electric two-wheeler maker. By 2023 he had a reputation for building capital-intensive Indian challengers to foreign incumbents in taxis and vehicles. He turned that instinct on artificial intelligence. In June 2023, Aggarwal publicly pushed back on OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman’s suggestion that it was “hopeless” for teams outside a handful of well-funded labs to train foundation models, arguing India could and should build its own. Krutrim — Sanskrit for “artificial” — was incorporated that April with Tenneti, a long-serving Ola Group governance and finance hand, as co-founder. The founding insight was explicitly nationalist and full-stack: India, Aggarwal argued, needed home-grown language models tuned to Indian languages, its own AI cloud rather than dependence on American hyperscalers, and eventually its own AI silicon, all under one roof.

The struggle years

The gap between that pitch and the early product was immediate. Krutrim unveiled its first base model in December 2023, describing an LLM trained on more than 2 trillion tokens that could understand 22 languages and generate text in ten. Reviewers who tested it, including trade press coverage at the time, found a model that hallucinated and produced incoherent answers to simple prompts, without a published model card or clear benchmark disclosures — an unusually rough debut for a company already being described as India’s answer to OpenAI. By May 2024, Forbes reported that Krutrim’s newly launched AI cloud service was also falling short of developer expectations on documentation and reliability.

Matters did not stabilise. Through 2024 and 2025, a string of senior departures hit the company, including its vice-president of products, its vice-president of AI engineering, its business head and, later, its founding head of AI and a Bodhi Computing co-founder, according to reporting compiled by Inc42. In May 2025, a Krutrim data-science employee, a recent graduate of the Indian Institute of Science, died by suicide; an anonymous post that circulated widely on Reddit alleged extreme work pressure and named a senior Gen AI engineering leader over allegations of verbal abuse, which the company did not directly address beyond confirming the employee had been on approved leave. Layoffs followed in waves: over 100 roles cut in July 2025, roughly 50 more in the linguistics team in September 2025, taking headcount down from more than 550 in August 2025 to around 150–160 by March 2026, and reportedly to as few as 40–50 after a further round in mid-2026. Alongside the job cuts, Krutrim shelved its most ambitious public commitments: the next-generation foundation model effort and the Bodhi, Sarv and Ojas chip programmes it had announced with partners including Arm and Untether AI were paused.

The turning point

The turning point was a deliberate retreat, not a single event: a business realignment through late 2025 in which Krutrim, in its own words, reallocated capital and talent away from consumer AI and semiconductor design toward its AI cloud stack. The numbers either side of that decision are stark. In FY25 (year to March 2025), Krutrim reported revenue of about ₹101.7 crore against expenses of roughly ₹159.4 crore, with close to 90 percent of that revenue coming from just two related Ola Group entities, Ola Electric Mobility and ANI Technologies — meaning the company was, commercially, still mostly selling to itself. By FY26, after the pivot, Krutrim said revenue had roughly tripled to about ₹300 crore, it had signed more than 25 external enterprise customers, and it had booked its first annual net profit with a profit-after-tax margin above 10 percent — company-stated figures that have not yet been verified against an independently audited filing.

The money behind it

Krutrim’s headline funding event was its January 2024 Series A: $50 million in equity that valued the company at $1 billion, led by Matrix Partners India (rebranded Z47 later that year) with the Sarin family as co-investor, and announced alongside quotes from Aggarwal about building “the country’s first complete AI computing stack.” That round, on its own, made Krutrim India’s fastest-ever unicorn. It was followed in February 2025 by a far larger and more unusual commitment: Aggarwal said he would personally invest about ₹2,000 crore (roughly $230 million), financed largely through his family office via a mix of equity and debt, while targeting a total raise of $1.15 billion by 2026 with the balance to come from outside investors — a target that, as of the most recent reporting, has been reported but not confirmed as fully achieved. Combining the disclosed rounds, Krutrim’s total known capital is close to $280–300 million. By FY26, the company said it had become financially self-sustaining and no longer needed a near-term infusion, including from its own founder.

How it makes money

The business model Krutrim pitched investors on in 2023 and 2024 — licensing proprietary LLMs and, eventually, selling India-made AI chips — has not been the one that has generated revenue. What has worked, on the company’s own numbers, is the least differentiated part of the original plan: renting out GPU-backed compute, storage and enterprise AI tooling from its own data centres, sold as an AI cloud to businesses that would otherwise buy the equivalent from AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. Krutrim has not published a take rate, margin structure or unit economics for this cloud business, so the operating leverage behind its stated double-digit profit-after-tax margin in FY26 cannot be independently checked. What people commonly get wrong about Krutrim is assuming its value lies in the LLM or chip story that made headlines; on the revenue actually disclosed, the company now looks far more like an infrastructure reseller competing on price, reliability and Indian data residency than like a foundation-model company monetising unique model IP.

The numbers

These figures mix independently reported regulatory-filing data (FY24 and FY25) with company-stated, as-yet-unaudited claims for FY26; where the two categories differ in reliability, that is flagged above rather than smoothed over.

Where the money comes from

The split is the most telling part of Krutrim’s story. In FY25, close to 90 percent of revenue came from just two related-party customers within the wider Ola Group — Ola Electric Mobility and ANI Technologies (which runs Ola’s ride-hailing business) — raising the question of how much independent commercial demand Krutrim actually had at that point. The surprise is how sharply that changed in FY26: the company says its more than 25 enterprise customers now span telecom operators, banks and financial institutions, consumer internet platforms, healthcare and logistics companies and other AI or deep-tech firms, a genuine broadening beyond the Ola family of companies, even though Krutrim has not named these customers individually or disclosed what share of FY26 revenue they represent relative to any residual related-party business.

The risks

Three risks stand out. First, governance and dependency: Krutrim’s own disclosed FY25 numbers show it was, until recently, substantially a captive vendor to other Aggarwal-controlled entities, which makes its reported turnaround harder to read as pure market validation and ties its fortunes to the health of Ola Electric and Ola’s ride-hailing business. Second, execution and people risk: multiple rounds of layoffs between mid-2025 and mid-2026, a wave of senior exits, and public allegations of a high-pressure culture following an employee’s death in May 2025 point to organisational strain that a profit announcement does not by itself resolve. Third, competitive and strategic risk: by pausing its foundation-model and semiconductor ambitions to focus on AI cloud, Krutrim now competes more directly in commodity infrastructure against global hyperscalers with far deeper balance sheets, leaving price, localisation and data residency — rather than proprietary technology — as its main points of differentiation.

The takeaway

Krutrim’s arc is a reminder that a headline-grabbing valuation and an eventual revenue-generating business can be built on almost entirely different bets. The parts of Krutrim’s plan that made it India’s fastest unicorn — sovereign large language models and home-grown AI chips — are the parts it has since paused. The part that quietly produced revenue, customers and a first profit was the least ambitious-sounding piece of the original pitch: renting out cloud infrastructure. The transferable lesson is not that big AI ambitions are wrong, but that a founder willing to keep re-pricing the plan against what customers will actually pay for, rather than what generates the most attention, is more likely to still be standing a few years in.

Frequently asked questions

What does Krutrim do now?

As of 2026, Krutrim primarily sells AI cloud infrastructure and enterprise AI services — compute, storage and related tools — to businesses across sectors such as telecom, banking, healthcare and logistics, alongside maintaining its Krutrim Maps product and its Krutrim-1/Krutrim-2 language models.

Is Krutrim the same company as Ola Electric or Ola’s ride-hailing business?

No. Krutrim (formally Krutrim SI Designs) is a separate company founded by Bhavish Aggarwal in 2023, distinct from Ola Electric (listed EV maker) and ANI Technologies (Ola’s ride-hailing business), though the three have been commercially and financially linked, with Ola Electric and ANI Technologies together accounting for around 90 percent of Krutrim’s FY25 revenue.

How much funding has Krutrim raised?

Krutrim raised $50 million in a January 2024 round led by Matrix Partners India (now Z47) with the Sarin family, at a $1 billion valuation. In February 2025, founder Bhavish Aggarwal committed a further roughly ₹2,000 crore (about $230 million) of his own capital, targeting a total raise of $1.15 billion, a target reported but not independently confirmed as fully closed.

Is Krutrim profitable?

Krutrim says it booked its first annual net profit in FY26 (year to March 2026), with a company-stated profit-after-tax margin above 10 percent on revenue of about ₹300 crore, after years of losses, including a loss in FY25 when revenue was ₹101.7 crore against expenses of about ₹159.4 crore. These FY26 figures are company-stated and not yet confirmed via an independently audited filing.

What happened to Krutrim’s plans for India-made AI chips?

Krutrim had announced three chip programmes — Bodhi (AI), Sarv (general compute) and Ojas (edge) — with partners including Arm and Untether AI, targeting a first chip around 2026. Those semiconductor efforts, along with next-generation foundation-model work, were paused in a late-2025 strategic realignment that refocused the company on AI cloud services.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Bloomberg, “Ola Founder’s Krutrim Becomes First $1 Billion Indian AI Startup”, January 2024
• Business Today, “AI unicorn: Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s Krutrim becomes India’s first $1 billion AI startup”, January 2024
• TechCrunch, “Ola founder’s AI startup Krutrim unicorn in $50M funding”, January 2024
• Bloomberg, “Ola Founder’s AI Startup Launches LLM in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali”, December 2023
• Business Standard, “‘India’s own AI’: Ola’s Bhavish unveils Krutrim, the multi-lingual AI for 1.4 bn Indians”, December 2023
• Wikipedia, “Bhavish Aggarwal”, accessed September 2026
• TechCrunch, “SoftBank-backed billionaire to invest $230M in Indian AI startup Krutrim”, February 2025
• Business Standard, “Bhavish Aggarwal injects Rs 2K cr into Krutrim, open-sources its AI”, February 2025
• Forbes India, “Inside Ola’s not-so-electric ride with Krutrim AI”, 2025
• Inc42, “Can Bhavish Aggarwal Drag Ola Krutrim Out Of The Rut?”, 2026
• YourStory, “Krutrim makes no revenue; pours Rs 134.8 Cr into R&D in debut year”, November 2024
• Business Standard, “Krutrim techie’s ‘suicide’ raises question over workplace culture”, May 2025
• Inc42, “Ola Krutrim Engineer’s Death By Suicide Raises Toxic Workplace Red Flags”, May 2025
• Forbes, “Ola Krutrim’s AI Cloud Falls Short Of Expectations For Developers”, May 2024
• Data Center Dynamics, “India’s Krutrim plans three chips and 1GW cloud expansion from 2026”, 2026
• CIOL, “Krutrim Cuts Nearly Half of Its Remaining Workforce in Fresh Restructuring”, 2026
• StartupWired, “Krutrim Cuts AI Expansion Amid Rising Market Pressure”, May 2026
• Business Standard, “Krutrim reports first profit, triples revenue as it pivots to AI cloud”, May 2026
• Daily Excelsior, “Krutrim announces strategic pivot to AI cloud services, reports 3X revenue growth and first net profit in FY26”, May 2026

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