Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s AI venture, Krutrim, has reportedly laid off several employees in the company’s linguistics department in its second round of job cuts this year.
More than 100 employees have been impacted by the layoffs as part of Krutrim’s strategy to make its workforce leaner, according to a report by Economic Times.
“As part of a strategic realignment and our commitment to efficient capital deployment, we are building leaner, more agile teams. This transition aligns with evolving business priorities and reflects our long-term vision to build India’s own full-stack AI platform,” a Krutrim spokesperson told The Indian Express in a statement.
The AI startup did not confirm exact figures on how many job roles have been cut in this round of layoffs. “We urge you to refrain from publishing unverified reports that are not substantiated by accurate facts,” it said.
Krutrim reportedly hired linguists for full-time roles to train its AI models and evaluate its responses in at least 10 Indian languages, including Tamil, Odia, Telugu, and Marathi. The company’s linguistics team comprised over 600 people, as per the report.
In June this year, Krutrim reportedly axed dozens of linguist roles after the introduction of its agentic AI app called Kruti, which is capable of autonomously booking cabs and ordering food on the Ola platform. It also has plans to enable ride bookings and food delivery orders on rival platforms such as Uber, Zomato, Swiggy, etc, through the AI agent.
Earlier this year, Krutrim released a handful of new “open-source” AI models with the aim of making India have a stronger presence in the AI race, which is currently dominated by the US and China.
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Aggarwal, the founder and chief executive officer of the company, had announced a $230-million injection of funds into Krutrim and said he was seeking an additional investment of $1.15 billion by 2026.
He also announced Krutrim AI Labs to carry out frontier AI research with a focus on “developing India’s first frontier-scale AI models, creating state-of-the-art multimodal AI systems, and publishing breakthrough research in top-tier AI conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, Interspeech, and CVPR,” as per the official website.
In May this year, a machine learning engineer at Krutrim was found dead in Bengaluru. Allegations cropped up on social media suggesting that the 25-year-old died by suicide due to “work pressure”. However, the company responded to the social media posts, saying that the employee, Nikhil Somwanshi, was “on personal leave at the time of the incident.”
