September starts with another round of layoffs, this time at Krutrim. 50 people from its linguistics team had to say goodbye to the company. This is their third since 2024. Krutrim is an AI company founded by Ola. There seem to be gaps in their technology, and that’s the reason why their AI advancements haven’t taken off. Is this the reason why Krutrim is laying off people now? Or are they cost-cutting for some reason? Learn more.
What Happened at Krutrim?
Approximately 50 linguists (transcribers and team leaders were included) from the team, who were working on regional languages such as Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi, etc., were laid off. Notably, this is their third layoff since June 2024.
Bigger Picture of Layoffs at Krutrim
- From 2024 to date, more than 200 employees have been laid off, and a few of them left the company themselves at Krutrim.
- In their second round of layoffs in July 2024, over 100 people were let go.
- At least six senior executives of Krutrim left the company (these executives are heads of AI data, software engineering, cloud, and finance teams).
- Just from these layoffs and resignations, 20+ other employees had already resigned.
Why Is Krutrim Cutting the Jobs?
According to Krutrim, these layoffs were crucial for their “strategic realignment,” meaning they are restructuring the company to focus only on specific work.
Furthermore, its linguistics work (data annotation) related projects are done, and the jobs no longer serve any purpose to the company. So, they were let go.
The company mentioned that it is currently looking for a smaller, leaner team as it works towards its major AI projects in 2025.
What Is Krutrim Building? The Big AI Project…
Apparently, Krutrim and the team are focused on Krutrim 3. Notably, it's their biggest AI language model so far. The model will have billions of parameters (meaning the brain size of an AI). Other than this huge project in hand, they also have two other AI products that they want to work on:
- Krutrim Cloud and Kruti. Kruti, it's their AI assistant app (similar to Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and others).
- Although the app was launched in June 2024, it has 207,000 downloads, but it is still not that popular.
- To make the project a big success, the company has recently acquired BharatSahAIyak. It's a public-sector AI solution.
- It has plans to advance its data center capacity to 1 GW by 2028 and set $1.2 billion in funding to make it a success.
Krutrim’s Money and Investments
- Interestingly, Krutrim became a unicorn in January 2024 after raising about $75 million in funds.
- Big investors, such as Z47 and the Sarin family, and others. Yet, the company didn't experience huge popularity for its products in the market.
- In December 2023, Bhavish Aggarwal, the company's founder, decided to give his Ola Electric shares to raise debt funding for Krutrim. And the amount was rumored to be $300 million and more, but Krutrim dismissed the claims.
Original Article
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