Ola's AI Venture Krutrim Ramps Up Hiring Amid Senior Exits and Ambitious Investment Plans

Ola Krutrim ramps up AI hiring amid exits

In the past year, Krutrim has seen close to a dozen junior to senior management-level exits even as the company doubles down on AI initiatives. These exits include Vipul Shah, who was vice president-products, Gautam Bhargava, who was vice president and head of AI engineering, and Ravi Jain, who was business head.Ola's AI arm Krutrim is ramping up hiring for its AI labs even as it continues to see exits, including that of senior resources. The company is hiring for a series of roles for its US, Singapore and Bengaluru AI labs. The roles that were posted last month on LinkedIn and are no longer accepting applications include GenAI research engineer, research scientist for speech and audio recognition, and AI cloud platform engineer for its office in California. The company also recently hired Sunit S as senior vice president-product. These hirings come amid the exits it has been seeing since last year. Early this year, two senior resources -- applied AI director Ashish Kumar and senior engineering manager Priyanka Nayak, who was with Ola group for over a decade -- left the firm. Also Read: Ola's AI venture runs into human (resources) glitch Kumar was looking at agentic AI for the enterprise application at Krutrim. He is now head of platforms for AI and data at Tata Group, according to his LinkedIn profile. Nayak, who started her career with Ola in 2013, was the senior engineering manager at Krutrim from August 2023. She left the firm in January, according to her LinkedIn post. In the past year, Krutrim has seen close to a dozen junior to senior management-level exits even as the company doubles down on AI initiatives. These exits include Vipul Shah, who was vice president-products, Gautam Bhargava, who was vice president and head of AI engineering, and Ravi Jain, who was business head. Krutrim did not respond to ET's queries seeking comment on the continued exits. Last month, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said the company is investing Rs 2,000 crore in Krutrim AI labs with a commitment to step this up to Rs 10,000 crore next year. Aggarwal posted on X that Krutrim was giving the open-source community access to its work. He also released the Krutrim 2 LLM, vision language model Chitrarth 1 and speech language model Dhwani.

Ola Steps Up Hiring For Krutrim AI Labs Amid Exits: Report

Krutrim also appointed Sunit S as senior vice president of product, as a part of its commitment to bolster its leadership team Amid a series of high-profile exits over the past year, Ola group's artificial intelligence venture Krutrim is reportedly stepping up hiring efforts for its AI labs located in Bengaluru, US and Singapore. An ET report said that the startup is actively recruiting for roles such as GenAI research engineer, research scientist for speech and audio recognition, and AI cloud platform engineer. Inc42 has reached out to Krutrim for comments on the development. The story will be updated based on the response. Recently, the startup appointed Sunit S as senior vice president of product, as a part of its commitment to bolster its leadership team. However, the company also witnessed two senior departures earlier this year, including applied AI director Ashish Kumar and senior engineering manager Priyanka Nayak. While Kumar stepped down in February after working about a year with Krutrim, Nayak exited in January after an 18-month stint. Despite these challenges, CEO Bhavish Aggarwal is optimistic about the AI unicorn's future. In February, the company announced plans to invest INR 2,000 Cr in Krutrim, with a commitment of INR 10,000 Cr by next year. Aggarwal also revealed that Krutrim is building its AI models, including Krutrim 2 LLM, vision language model Chitrarth 1 and speech language model Dhwani, accessible to the open source community. The announcement of rolling out the Krutrim AI lab was made in February, just days after Krutrim announced it is hosting open source AI models of Chinese GenAI company DeepSeek on its cloud platform. Krutrim AI Lab has released a host of models that aims to redefine the AI ecosystem in India including Krutrim 2 and Krutrim 1 LLMs, Chitrarth, Dhwani , Vyakhyarth 1 and Krutrim Translate 1. It also introduced BharatBench, a tool designed to assess AI models' effectiveness in Indian contexts. Amid growing demand for AI services, investor interest in the sector is gaining significant momentum. India's GenAI startup brigade has raised $1.2 Bn in funding since 2014. Besides, the Centre is also ramping up its efforts to develop AI models in the country through its IndiaAI mission. Recently, a report surfaced that the government has been inviting private entities, including startups to share anonymous, non-personal datasets of their users to the AIKosha platform. AIKosha features AI sandbox capabilities via integrated development environment along with tools and tutorials, while also equipped with features such as content discoverability, scoring of datasets, permission based access and security mechanisms, secure APIs and firewalls. In January, union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India is planning to build its own domestic large language model (LLM) as part of the INR 10,037 Cr IndiaAI Mission. As per Inc42 data, the homegrown GenAI market is expected to see a major boom in the coming years and will likely cross the $17 Bn mark by 2030.