Tag: bhavish aggarwal

Ola Electric Founder’s AI Startup Krutrim Becomes India’s First AI Unicorn

Krutrim, the AI startup founded by serial entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, has gained unicorn status after securing $50 million in funding from investors including Matrix Partners India. It becomes the first Indian AI startup to gain a billion-dollar valuation, a mere month after debuting a large language model, the firm said in a blog post. Krutrim, which translates to “artificial” in Sanskrit, is also developing data centers and will ultimately aim to create servers and super computers for the AI ecosystem.

A clutch of Indian startups and academic groups are racing to build large language models in Indian languages, so called Indic LLMs, after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT more than a year ago. Countries are hoping to create their own competing AI systems, rather than relying on technology from the US or China. In Europe, investors are pouring cash into France’s Mistral AI, valued at $2 billion after being founded last year. The United Arab Emirates touts its Falcon model, which is backed by an Abu Dhabi government research institute.

India, with 1.4 billion people, is focusing on building smaller, more cost efficient AI systems. Generative AI startup Sarvam, which built its system using available open-source models, launched OpenHathi, its first open-source Hindi LLM last month. The announcement came days after it had raised $41 million in an investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, billionaire Vinod Khosla and others.

“India has to build its own AI,” Aggarwal, the founder of Indian ride-hailing startup Ola, said in the statement. “We are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack.”

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Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Aggarwal Says Scooter Fires Rare, but Can Happen in Future

There may be more fires in electric scooters in the future but such incidents are very rare, the chief executive of India’s Ola Electric said at a private company event, after safety concerns were heightened by a fire in one of its scooters in March.

Ola’s e-scooter fire was among a spate of similar recent incidents that triggered an uproar on social media and an investigation by the Indian government.

The company, backed by Japan’s SoftBank Group, has recalled more than 1,400 e-scooters and appointed external experts to investigate the cause.

“Will there be occurrences in the future, there might be,” chief executive Bhavish Aggarwal responded, when asked a question about the fires at a private event on Sunday.

“But our commitment is that we will make sure we analyse every issue and if there are fixes to be done we will fix them,” he said, according to a recording from the event reviewed by Reuters.

He described the fires as being “very rare and isolated” in a recording from the event, at which the company previewed a new operating system for its e-scooters.

Fire safety in the automotive industry was a broader issue beyond electric vehicles (EVs), Aggarwal said, adding that petrol-fuelled vehicles had greater need of quality control regulations than the EV industry.

More gasoline-based scooters have caught fire compared with electric models, and this issue pertains to the two-wheeler industry as a whole, Ola Group’s chief financial officer Arun Kumar told Reuters.

Initial findings of the government investigation of the e-scooter fires revealed an issue with Ola’s battery cells and battery management system, Reuters reported last week, though the firm said its battery management system was not at fault.

Incidents of fires involving e-scooters from Indian start-ups Okinawa and PureEV are also being investigated.

“There will be, sometimes, some minor defects in, maybe the cell, maybe something else, which will cause some internal short circuit,” Aggarwal said, adding that Ola had just one incident among its 50,000 e-scooters on the road.

Ola imports its cells from South Korea’s LG Energy Solution. Kumar said all companies should source components responsibly and not from “unqualified Chinese suppliers”, for instance.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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