Bhavish Aggarwal-led Ola's AI Vertical Krutrim Lays off 50 People from its Regional Language Teams; Calls it Strategic Realignment

According to a report rolled out by The Economic Times, Krutrim, the AI vertical of Ola, has carried out its third round of layoffs since June, letting go of approximately 50 employees from its linguistics team.

The affected staff includes team leads and transcribers working on regional languages like Bengali, Malayalam, and Punjabi.

This brings the total number of exits from Krutrim to over 200 employees this year, including several in leadership roles.

In its second round of downsizing done back in July, the company let go of more than 100 employees.

The decision to downsize comes at a time when Krutrim is focused on building its most ambitious project yet, Krutrim 3, a powerful multibillion advanced large language model (LLM).

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The reason behind downsizing

In an official media statement, the company described the layoffs as part of a “strategic realignment” aimed at streamlining teams to better focus on its core AI platform.

The company further added that the current phase of data annotation, which involved extensive linguistics work, has now been completed.

Following the latest round of layoffs, insiders indicate that Krutrim may be planning to outsource certain language-related tasks rather than continue supporting large in-house teams.

The company has not commented on whether additional job cuts are on the horizon.

This restructuring reflects a wider trend of uncertainty across India’s AI and tech startup landscape, where many companies have scaled back hiring or downsized teams in response to sluggish funding and increased pressure to demonstrate commercial viability.

The chain of past resignations

Since April, at least six senior leaders, including heads of AI data, software engineering, cloud architecture, and corporate finance, have resigned and left the firm.

These exits add to more than 20 others across various levels earlier in FY25.

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Krutrim's AI Journey: Funding Milestones, Product Challenges, and Expansion Plans

Krutrim’s AI products, such as Krutrim Cloud and its large language model solutions, are struggling to gain significant traction due to technological loopholes.

According to SensorTower, the AI assistant app Kruti has been downloaded 207,000 times since its launch in June.

In January 2024, Krutrim raised around $75 million and secured a position in the unicorn club.

Notable investors include Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners), the Sarin Family, and others.

Earlier, in December 2023, founder Bhavish Aggarwal pledged his Ola Electric shares to secure debt funding through debenture issuance to support Krutrim’s operations. 

While reports suggested the company was in talks to raise $300 million in a new funding round, Krutrim has officially denied these claims.

Looking ahead, Krutrim has committed up to $1.2 billion over the next few years and aims to scale its data center capacity to 1 GW by 2028.

In addition to this, Krutrim has recently acquired BharatSahAIyak, a public-sector AI solutions firm, from technology consulting company Samagra, signaling an intent to expand in the domain of government tech and enterprise AI.

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