In plain words
Krutrim is a company, not a single app. It was started by Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of Ola, the Indian ride-hailing company. The name is the Sanskrit word for "artificial". In December 2023 it showed its first large language model, built to understand Indian languages as well as English.
Its early plan was to do everything at home: train its own models, offer a chatbot app called Kruti, run its own computers and even design chips. In January 2024 a funding round made it India's first AI unicorn, a start-up valued at a billion dollars.
Building top models turned out to be very costly. Krutrim then changed direction. Its main business now is an AI cloud: renting computing power to other companies over the internet. As of November 2026 its Kruti app is offline and its newest model is still Krutrim-2, from February 2025.
Everyday example
A home cook who opens a kitchen for hire
Someone sets up a big kitchen to cook their own new dishes. The dishes are hard to perfect and expensive to make. But the kitchen itself is excellent, so they start renting it to other caterers by the hour. Krutrim built its models in its own computing "kitchen", and now mostly rents that kitchen out.
Where the example breaks: A kitchen is easy to see and share. An AI cloud is rows of specialised computers in data centres, rented over the internet, so customers never see the machines they use.
How it actually works
Krutrim's story shows the layers of an AI business, from chips at the bottom to apps at the top.
Models for Indian languages
Its first model, shown in December 2023, was trained on about 2 trillion tokens and could understand 22 Indian languages and write in 10. Krutrim-1 opened to the public in January 2024.
Krutrim-2 and open models
In February 2025 it released Krutrim-2, a 12 billion parameter model built on the Mistral NeMo design, together with smaller models for images, speech and translation. Several were released with open weights, so anyone could download them.
A chatbot on top
Kruti was its chatbot and assistant app, launched to chat by text, voice and images for Indian users. It went offline in April 2026.
The cloud underneath
Under the models sits computing power: racks of GPUs in data centres. Krutrim now rents this capacity to businesses for training, fine-tuning and running models, which is the idea behind cloud AI.
- Founder
- Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola
- First model shown
- 15 December 2023, in Bengaluru
- Unicorn
- January 2024, after raising $50 million at a $1 billion valuation
- Name
- Krutrim means "artificial" in Sanskrit
Other Indian groups, such as Sarvam AI, kept building Indian-language models under the government's IndiaAI Mission.
Questions people ask
Is Krutrim owned by Ola?
It belongs to the Ola group of companies founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, alongside Ola's ride app and Ola Electric. Krutrim is a separate company, and its website calls it part of the Ola Group.
What happened to the Kruti app?
Kruti, Krutrim's AI assistant, disappeared from app stores and its website in April 2026. A few weeks later Krutrim said it was moving away from building AI models towards cloud services.
Is Krutrim India's ChatGPT?
It was introduced that way in 2023: a chatbot and models for Indian languages, much like ChatGPT. Today its main business is renting AI computing, not a consumer chatbot.
Is Krutrim open source?
Some of its models are. In February 2025 it released Krutrim-1, Krutrim-2 and several smaller models with open weights on Hugging Face, so developers could download and run them.
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Further reading
- 'India's own AI' Krutrim unveiled by Ola CEO Bhavish AggarwalBusiness Today, 2023
- Krutrim-2: A Best-in-Class Large Language Model for Indic LanguagesKrutrim, 2025
- Why India's first AI unicorn stopped building models and chipsNewsBytes, 2026
- Ola Krutrim AI Assistant 'Kruti' Goes Offline Across PlatformsAngel One, 2026
- Krutrim CloudKrutrim, 2026