In 6 short months, Ola Krutrim has launched, become a unicorn, released its first model, and become an AI cloud provider.
Ola Krutrim, Bhavish Agarwal’s AI startup, has launched its own AI cloud. “Excited to launch Krutrim AI Cloud GPUs on demand, priced not in $ but in ₹ for all devs in India!” he posted on X. “Share in comments what you would build using AI for India! Top 10 innovative ideas will get their AI cloud needs sponsored completely by us! Contest ends Sunday midnight,” he added.
Krutrim AI Cloud claims change the way AI developers build applications. “Krutrim Cloud is dedicated to revolutionizing the way professionals and organizations access high-perfomance computing. We deliver state-of-the-art GPU resources via the cloud, making advanced computing power accessible to everyone from individual to large enterprises.” its website says. “Deploy your projects with ease and turbocharge your performance. Effortlessly launch or reserve GPUs to accelerate your AI and large-scale applications with precision and speed,” it adds.
Ola Krutrim appears to have both NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs on its platform. The A100 prices start at Rs. 105 per hour, while the H100 prices start at Rs. 490 per hour. These GPUs will allow developers to train AI models and perform inference without needing to buy the expensive — and hard to procure — GPUs by themselves. There are a few other Indian companies, such as E2E Networks which provide access to GPUs, but Ola Krutrim appears to be priced competitively — while E2E Networks provides the A100 GPU at Rs. 226 per hour, Ola’s prices are less than half at Rs. 105.
Ola, for its part, appears to be moving quickly in the AI space. Krutrim had been publicly launched on 15th December 2023, and just 41 days later, on 26th January 2024, it had announced that it had become a unicorn with a $50 million fundraise. Just a month later, Ola had launched its first AI model that focused on Indian languages. While there was some criticism of the model after it had told some users it was made by OpenAI, the model appears to have stabilized. Now in June, Ola has launched its own cloud, which will allow developers to build their own AI applications. It’s still early days, but now with both software and hardware products in its portfolio, Ola Krutrim seems to be moving quickly with its AI play.