Bhavish Aggarwal, the brain behind Ola, is making big moves in the AI space. He’s set to invest a whopping $230 million into Krutrim, an AI startup he founded. This comes as India aims to carve out its spot in a field currently led by the U.S. and China.

The funding, largely backed by Aggarwal’s family office, is part of a broader plan to raise $1.15 billion by next year. The rest is expected to come from external investors. The announcement comes as Krutrim makes its AI models open source and joins forces with Nvidia to build what’s being called India’s largest supercomputer.

Krutrim has already launched Krutrim-2, a 12-billion parameter language model that’s excelling in processing Indian languages. It’s outperforming competitors in sentiment analysis and code generation, showcasing India’s growing AI capabilities.

The startup is also focusing on specialized models for tasks like image processing, speech translation, and text search—all fine-tuned for Indian languages. Aggarwal shared on X, “We’re nowhere close to global benchmarks yet but have made good progress in one year.” He hopes opening up these models will encourage collaboration within India’s AI community.

This push aligns with India’s broader goal to become a key player in AI. Recent advancements, like DeepSeek’s R1 model, have sparked excitement in the tech world. Krutrim is already hosting DeepSeek’s models on Indian servers, further solidifying its position.

Krutrim also introduced BharatBench, a unique framework to evaluate AI models’ proficiency in Indian languages—a much-needed tool given the current focus on English and Chinese.

With plans to launch a supercomputer in March and expand throughout the year, Krutrim is on track to make waves in the AI landscape. This investment marks a significant step in India’s journey to become a global AI leader.