Krutrim, the AI (artificial intelligence) firm founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, has turned into a unicorn after raising $50 million in a funding round led by Matrix Partners.

A unicorn is a firm whose valuation is $1 billion. The fundraising made Krutrim, the first AI unicorn from India and the first start-up to get the tag in this calendar year.

“Krutrim, India’s own AI company focused on building the complete AI computing stack, announced the successful closure of its first round of funding. The funding round, led by prominent investors such as Matrix Partners India and others, garnered an investment of $50 million in equity at a valuation of $1 billion,” the company said.

The start-up added that funds raised will be instrumental in accelerating its mission to revolutionize the AI landscape, drive innovation and expand its reach globally.

“India has to build its own AI, and at Krutrim, we are fully committed to building the country’s first complete AI computing stack,” Aggarwal, who is also the founder of Ola, said.

“We are thrilled to announce the successful closure of our first funding round, which not only validates the potential of Krutrim’s innovative AI solutions but also underscores the confidence investors have in our ability to drive meaningful change out of India for the world,” Aggarwal said.

Krutrim unveiled its base large language model (LLM — a deep learning algorithm that can understand and generate human language text or content) last month.

With the largest representation of Indian data used for its training, Krutrim said that it powers generative AI applications for all Indian languages.

Trained by a team of leading computer scientists, based in Bangalore and San Francisco, the model will also power Krutrim’s conversational AI assistant that claims to understand and speak multiple Indian languages fluently.

Krutrim is a family of LLMs, including Krutrim base and Krutrim Pro which will have multimodal, larger knowledge capabilities and many other technical advancements for inference.Last month, the company announced that it would run an early access programme until January 2024 with a simple sign-up page on the website.