Ola Krutrim Ramps up Hiring For Its AI Labs Amid Exits
In the past year, Bengaluru-based Krutrim has seen close to 1000 employees, including around a dozen of senior managers exit, even as the company doubles down on AI initiatives.
The executives who have left the firm include Vipul Shah (vice president, products), Gautam Bhargava (vice president, head of AI engineering), Samrat Saha (director, machine learning), Achal Kumar Mall (director of product management), Mikhil Raj (senior director of product management), and Ashok Jagannathan (vice president).
Nevertheless, Krutrim, the AI arm of Ola, is ramping up hiring for a series of roles for its US, Singapore and Bengaluru AI labs. The roles that were posted last month on LinkedIn are already filled, including GenAI research engineer, research scientist for speech and audio recognition, and AI cloud platform engineer for its office in California.
The company recently hired Sunit S as senior vice president-product.
Early last year, Krutrim, achieved unicorn status (a term used to describe startups valued at $1 billion or above), following its inaugural funding round. The round, which saw participation from notable investors, such as Matrix Partners India, gathered investments worth $50 million in equity at a valuation of $1 billion.
Last month, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal announced an investment of Rs 2,000 crore on Krutrim, with a commitment to invest an additional Rs 10,000 crore by next year.
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Furthermore, he announced the launch of KrutrimAI lab and said that the company has released its work to the open-source community, while publishing several technical reports. This move follows DeepSeek’s recent decision to open-source its own generative AI model.
With this latest investment, Krutrim has raised close to $280 million.