- Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal has personally funded Krutrim through pledged Ola Electric shares and direct cash injections after external funding ceased.
- Krutrim pivoted to a full-stack AI cloud platform, migrating Ola group workloads off Microsoft Azure by May 2025.
- Krutrim’s revenue largely comes from other Ola group entities, raising questions about its ability to attract independent external clients.
Bhavish Aggarwal has been keeping his AI startup Krutrim alive largely out of his own pocket. With external funding dried up since early 2024 and monthly costs running at $4-5 million, the Ola co-founder has pledged personal shareholdings and injected cash to keep the company going, while simultaneously betting it can take on Microsoft in enterprise productivity.
Krutrim’s AI pivot
Krutrim hit unicorn status in 2024 with an estimated $1 billion valuation, backed by $50 million from investors including Matrix Partners India. That early momentum came with ambitions around chip development and building AI models from the ground up. By late 2025, according to reports, the company had redirected its engineering teams and capital toward a full-stack AI cloud platform instead.
The most visible sign of this shift came in May 2025, when Aggarwal said the Ola group had moved its workloads off Microsoft Azure and onto Krutrim’s own cloud infrastructure. The platform now handles enterprise workloads across mobility, manufacturing and customer operations, though the majority of that work comes from within the Ola group itself.
The most visible sign of this shift came in May 2025, when Aggarwal said the Ola group had moved its workloads off Microsoft Azure and onto Krutrim’s own cloud infrastructure.
Building an AI assistant: Kruti
Launched in June 2025, Krutrim’s AI assistant Kruti is built on the company’s own V2 large language model and targets Indian users with multilingual support and reasoning features. The company says it is available free of charge and includes an image generator and action agents, with an enterprise platform for deploying custom AI agents planned for later release.
On paper, Kruti sits in the same space as OpenAI‘s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, drafting, summarising, workflow automation. Whether it can pull enterprise users away from tools already embedded in their workflows is a different question, and one Krutrim has not yet answered publicly with customer data.
Aggarwal’s personal stake and the funding gap
After the initial $50 million round closed in January 2024, no further external funding followed. With monthly burn at $4-5 million, Aggarwal has covered the gap himself, according to reports. He pledged 10.7 crore Ola Electric shares, around 2.4% of the company’s equity, to raise debt for Krutrim. When Ola Electric’s share price moved against him, he reportedly injected around ₹20 crore (approximately $2.3 million) in cash to maintain collateral coverage.
The revenue picture adds another layer of concern. In the period when Krutrim SI Designs Pvt Ltd reported total revenue from operations of approximately ₹101.7 crore, a large share of that came from Ola Electric Mobility and ANI Technologies, according to reports. That concentration has drawn scrutiny over governance and whether shareholder-backed resources in the Ola group are effectively subsidising a promoter-owned entity.
Internal setbacks and what comes next
Internally, Kruti’s consumer app has been described as “a massive failure,” according to people familiar with the matter. The cloud division is, by similar accounts, still propped up by Ola workloads rather than independent clients.
Aggarwal announced in early 2025 that he planned to build India’s largest supercomputer, backed by ₹2,000 crore in initial funding and a further commitment of ₹10,000 crore the following year. That kind of infrastructure investment is necessary for training large models and running cloud operations at scale, but right now, Krutrim’s story is still Aggarwal’s personal bet, on his own capital, his own group’s workloads, and a market that has not yet validated the product on its own terms. For more on how AI companions and assistants are affecting everyday users, see our coverage of what happens when AI tools fall short of their promises. Explore more AI tools and tips in our Consumer AI section.
