Krutrim’s AI vision aims to power India’s sovereign tech future

Krutrim is taking on a huge challenge: building an AI-first cloud, homegrown silicon and a sovereign artificial intelligence ecosystem for India.

Speaking to TechDay at Cloudera Evolve, Navendu Agarwal, Senior Vice President and Head of Business at Krutrim, set out an ambitious roadmap that spans AI research, applied AI applications, cloud infrastructure and chip design. All of which is backed by the founder's capital and a vision to make AI affordable and locally relevant.

"We are trying to become the hyperscaler of India," Agarwal said. "India doesn't have its own Baidu or Tencent. With AWS and Azure charging the same in India as in the US - sometimes even more - sovereignty becomes a big problem. We want to fundamentally bring the cost down so AI adoption can take off."

A three-pronged approach

Krutrim, a Sanskrit word for artificial intelligence, is one of three companies founded under the Ola brand alongside Ola Consumer and Ola Electric. The AI venture has three divisions: silicon, cloud and AI. Within AI, there are two further units - a research arm building foundation models, and an applied AI team focused on real-world products.

The company has already trained two foundation models - one with seven billion parameters and another with 12 billion. Now it is training a 700 billion parameter model. "That's where we are saving a lot of training data, and using Cloudera components in our data ecosystem," Agarwal explained.

The silicon team, made up of 200 engineers from Intel, Qualcomm and other chipmakers, is working on AI accelerators and chips for Ola's electric scooters. Agarwal said the first chips will take three to five years to develop, but starting now is essential. "The country doesn't have chip capability. Somewhere we have to start."

The cloud

Krutrim's cloud strategy is rooted in its own history. Back in 2011, Ola built its own data lake on Hadoop because AWS had no presence in India. That early in-house expertise is now helping Krutrim reimagine cloud infrastructure for the AI era.

"We're not trying to build thousands of services like AWS," Agarwal said. "We're building what's required for our customers, at the right cost point and structure for India."

Cost control comes from vertical integration: buying hardware at scale for both the cloud and Ola Electric, negotiating better deals with manufacturers, and running lean margins compared to global providers. "AWS and Azure have 40%–50% margins. I may play with a 10% margin," he said.

The company is also designing the cloud to support India-specific requirements - from language diversity to voice-first interfaces, local government connectors and small business use cases. "India is not 100 companies. India is 10,000 companies. We want to build in India, for India."

An ecosystem

One of Krutrim's most distinctive projects is its assistant, Kriti - named after the Hindi word for "creation" - which Agarwal described as "ChatGPT plus Mano's plus plus." The vision is a Play Store of AI agents that can orchestrate complex tasks by connecting to applications.

"You can tell Kriti, 'book me a cab' or 'tell me my scooter's battery status' and it will connect to the right systems," he said. Initially, the integrations are for Ola's own services, but the platform will open to third parties, creating an ecosystem of agent-driven applications.

The ambition extends to enterprise software creation. Agarwal envisions users writing a single prompt to generate and deploy entire applications, with Krutrim's vertically integrated stack handling the orchestration. "End customers shouldn't care what's under the hood. That's the paradigm shift for an AI-first cloud."

Funding and timelines

Krutrim's current funding comes directly from Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, who is deliberately holding off external investment. The first Ola company raised heavily from global investors such as SoftBank, while Ola Electric went public and secured backing from Temasek and Tiger Global. But Krutrim's capital-heavy model requires patience.

"This is more capital-heavy. If we raise now, it will create bigger problems later. So we're waiting it out," Agarwal said. Initial workloads from Ola's own businesses provide a $100 million bootstrap for the cloud division, while partnerships with government and defence organisations are expected to support large-scale AI model training.

Timelines vary across divisions: silicon will take years, cloud is building in stages, and AI applications are already launching. "Most teams work independently but will integrate vertically over time," he noted.

The road ahead

Agarwal stressed that India cannot afford to rely solely on global providers for its digital future. "India requires sovereign AI. India requires sovereign cloud," he said. The challenge is to deliver these at the right cost, with the right capabilities, for a highly diverse and price-sensitive market.

While the scale of the task is daunting, Agarwal is confident the timing is right. Advances in technology mean what once took decades can now be built in years, and Krutrim's early expertise gives it a head start.

"We know we can't catch up to what AWS, Azure or Google built in 20 years by doing the same thing," he said. "We have to find different ways of building - AI-first, India-first - and that's exactly what we're doing."