Bhavish Aggarwal's AI Start-Up Krutrim Dismisses '$300 Million Fundraising Plan' Report

Bhavish Aggarwal's AI start-up Krutrim on Monday rejected the recent media report of its plan to raise $300 million (approximately Rs 2,561 crore) in a combination of equity and debt, according to a report published by newswire PTI. The artificial intelligence venture clarified that it is not engaged in any discussions regarding the same.

"The article falsely suggests that Krutrim is engaged in discussions to raise external equity capital and misrepresents the financial strategy and operations of the company. Krutrim categorically denies the claims made in the article," the statement read.

It stated that Krutrim is presently is not raising any external equity as the company is well funded by the promoter and select investors and it continues to invest towards executing its AI strategy, PTI reported. "Any report suggesting otherwise is entirely incorrect," it added.

Krutrim's Fundraise Report

Earlier today, Mint reported that Aggarwal is in discussion to raise $300 million --- lower than his previous funding plan of $500 million. The report stated that the start-up may get support from investors like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and SBI Capital Markets, the report said adding that there has been no concrete investment offers for Krutrim in the next funding round.

Of the $300 million expected fundraise, Matrix Partners may contribute around $25 million or more in this round. It has already invested $50 million in Ola Krutrim.

Ola Krutrim's Investment Plan

In February, Ola Krutrim announced that the company is ramping up its investment with a planned investment of Rs 10,000 crore over the next year. As part of this effort, the company also launched India’s first AI frontier research lab, Krutrim AI Lab.

It has already invested over Rs 2,000 crore to build India's largest AI computing clusters which are named GB200 and NVL72. These systems use NVIDIA's technology, which includes super-fast processors and powerful graphics chips to quickly process AI tasks.

“Our goal is to drive greater usage with our expanding cloud infrastructure and the increasing availability of GPUs. Adoption is still limited because use cases are still being developed, “ said Navendu Agarwal, Group CIO, Ola Electric.

Krutrim AI recently launched several models such as the multilingual vision language model (VLM) named Chitrarth-1 which combines capabilities from both computer vision (to understand images) and natural language processing (to understand and generate text). It is built to work across 10 prominent Indian languages—Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Assamese—as well as English.