At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi last week, almost every major Indian AI startup showed up. Sarvam, BharatGen, Gnani, and others launched sovereign models. Cloud players courted government contracts. Chip startups spoke about fabrication timelines. Policymakers pressed on scale and self-reliance.
One important name was missing: Krutrim.
Krutrim’s absence from the biggest AI summit yet stood out as it was launched in late 2023 to create an Indian version of ChatGPT. A month later, in January 2024, it had already achieved unicorn status after raising $50 million.
Founder Bhavish Aggarwal promised to replicate Ola’s success with Krutrim and build a full-stack AI ecosystem—from foundational models to cloud infrastructure and semiconductor chips.
Two years later, Krutrim has little visible presence—in the summit and beyond.
On its LinkedIn page, the AI unicorn had invited visitors to Hall 4, Booth 28 at the summit. On the ground, there was no major showcase, no headline session, no product demo drawing crowds.
AIM reached out to Krutrim but received no official response on the company’s involvement at the event.
The question writes itself. Where is Krutrim?
Missing in Action
A Krutrim employee, on the condition of anonymity, tells AIM that the company is not working on any LLM-related announcements, and, as of now, the focus is on Neo Cloud, its GPU-as-a-service offering. They add that this service is largely responsible for driving revenue.
According to the employee, Krutrim Cloud is currently on par with Yotta, E2E Networks, and Neysa. These firms are empanelled under the IndiaAI Mission to provide advanced GPU compute capacity.
Krutrim Cloud was launched in May 2024 to much fanfare, giving developers free access to open-source models and AI computing infrastructure till Diwali 2025.
Just a few days later, Aggarwal decided to move Ola’s entire workload from Microsoft Azure to its in-house platform, irked by LinkedIn’s content policy and saving ₹5 lakh a month, as the cloud service threatened to disrupt Big Tech monopoly.
Siddharth Bhardwaj, Co-founder and CTO of AI-driven music tech platform Beatoven.ai, was looking to save cloud costs as well. In January, the startup wanted to shift from Microsoft Azure to Krutrim Cloud; however, the founder says Krutrim could not provide the support.
“They don't even have a very basic setup ready for real AI workloads,” Bhardwaj says. “We were trying to deploy our own foundation model for inferencing, but they don't even provide managed Kubernetes for GPU instances and hence couldn't proceed.”
“I asked [them] if you have any companies using them for inferencing and if I can do a similar setup, to which I never got a proper reply… unfortunately, they are not mature enough yet,” he adds.
Krutrim Cloud is struggling with adoption, supporting workloads from Ola Electric and other Ola businesses. That makes Krutrim less an independent AI challenger and more an internal infrastructure arm.
Missing the Mark
The AI ecosystem had high hopes from Krutrim. Upon launch, the company said it would design its own AI chips under the Bodhi brand, build an Indian cloud alternative, and train large language models from scratch.
It unveiled a base LLM trained on Indian data and said it would power generative AI applications across languages. Aggarwal framed it as a national project. India, he said at the time, had to build its own AI stack.
The pitch resonated. India was talking about digital public infrastructure. The government had begun shaping the IndiaAI Mission. The idea of a sovereign AI champion found both political and investor support. But execution has been a struggle.
In June last year, Krutrim released Kruti, an AI assistant powered by a 12-billion open-source LLM optimised for English and 22 Indian languages. The AI assistant supports both text and voice inputs, and the company said it is capable of executing tasks such as cab booking, food ordering, bill payments, image creation, and in-depth research.
However, it only has over 100,000 downloads on Google Play Store, with users complaining of glitches, image processing, lags, and freezes.
In April 2025, Business Standard reported that Krutrim had cut its fundraising target from $500 million to about $300 million amid muted investor interest. The company later denied that it was in active talks to raise $300 million, saying it was well funded and not engaged in such discussions.
That public denial did not end questions about capital.
A TOI report revealed that the $50 million raised in early 2024 had largely been spent. At its peak, the company was burning $4–5 million a month, according to a senior executive cited in the report.
The company raised no new external funding after the initial round. Aggarwal had pledged 10.7 crore shares of Ola Electric, about 2.4% of the company’s equity, to raise debt for Krutrim. At the same time, the organisation was shrinking.
The Economic Times reported that more than 200 employees were laid off in phases, largely from the linguistic team working on the next version of its large language model. Senior exits followed. Close to half a dozen executives from the semiconductor design team left, raising doubts about the AI chip roadmap. TOI reported that the chip team had been largely disbanded, with only a handful of engineers retained.
The chip design unit had been bolstered by the acquisition of Bodhi Computing in 2023. By late 2025, that ambition appeared to have scaled back.
Other Priorities
AI research teams were hollowed out. What remained was a roughly 150-person cloud team largely serving Ola group companies.
All of this unfolded as the India AI narrative gathered pace.
The India AI Impact Summit, organised under the IndiaAI framework, showcased homegrown capability in foundational models, compute infrastructure, and AI applications. Startups positioned themselves as sovereign AI builders have used the event to signal readiness.
Krutrim, which once positioned itself as the face of India’s AI self-reliance, is not leading those conversations. Startups looking at the company for sovereign cloud needs and affordable AI infrastructure are left disappointed.
Krutrim’s absence from the summit was hard to ignore, given that the company had positioned itself as India’s AI champion. Now, over two years since its launch, its most visible achievement is perhaps the launch event itself.
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