Ola Krutrim, the ambitious artificial intelligence venture founded by Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal, is undergoing a significant strategic pivot. Once positioned as India’s sovereign AI champion with plans for foundational large language models (LLMs) and indigenous AI chips, the company has significantly scaled back these initiatives. Krutrim is now concentrating on AI cloud infrastructure and enterprise compute services, marking a dramatic reset in its operational focus.
The shift comes after a period of internal challenges, including senior-level exits and a reduction in workforce from over 550 employees in August 2025 to approximately 150-160 by March 2026. The company has reportedly paused work on its LLM and semiconductor projects and has discontinued its consumer chatbot, Kruti. These moves signal a retreat from its earlier, more expansive AI goals.
Launched in the wake of OpenAI’s ChatGPT success, Krutrim aimed to develop AI models tailored for India’s linguistic diversity and cultural context. It achieved unicorn status within a year of its inception, raising $50 million at a $1 billion valuation in early 2024. However, the pursuit of multiple ambitious verticals simultaneously—including LLMs, AI assistants, enterprise tools, cloud infrastructure, and semiconductor design—reportedly stretched the company too thin.
The semiconductor initiative, bolstered by the acquisition of AI chip design startup Bodhi Computing, faced significant capital and infrastructure hurdles inherent in the industry. Similarly, developing competitive LLMs requires substantial investment in GPU infrastructure and specialized talent, areas where Krutrim appears to have encountered difficulties.
The company’s consumer-facing chatbot, Kruti, has also ceased functioning, indicating a deprioritization of direct-to-consumer AI products, which are notoriously difficult to monetize against global giants like OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
Krutrim’s new strategic direction emphasizes AI cloud infrastructure services, offering GPU compute, inference, and deployment tooling. While the company has been providing these services internally to Ola Group companies, its external traction has faced scrutiny. Financial reports indicated that nearly 90% of its revenue in FY25 came from within the Ola ecosystem. Although Krutrim claims to be working with over 25 enterprise clients, it has yet to name new external customers.
This pivot places Krutrim in a more competitive landscape against established cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Industry observers note that while competitors offer unmatched scale, Krutrim’s focus on enterprise AI infrastructure may offer clearer monetization paths compared to the foundational AI model development it initially pursued. The company’s ability to gain significant external market share in the cloud services sector remains a key question as it navigates this new phase.
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