New Delhi, Jan 26 (IANS): Homegrown AI company Krutrim on Friday became the country's fastest unicorn and also the first AI unicorn in the country, after it closed its first round of funding.

The funding round, led by investors such as Matrix Partners India and others, garnered an investment of $50 million in equity at a valuation of $1 billion.

The funds raised will be instrumental in accelerating the company's mission to revolutionise the AI landscape, drive innovation, and expand its reach globally, it said in a statement.

“India has to build its own AI, and we are fully committed towards building the country’s first complete AI computing stack,” said Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder, Krutrim.

Avnish Bajaj, Founder and MD, Matrix Partners India said they are privileged to deepen their partnership with Bhavish and Krutrim.

Krutrim unveiled its base large language model (LLM) last month.

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

Trained by a team of leading computer scientists, based in Bengaluru and San Francisco, this model will also power Krutrim’s conversational AI assistant that understands and speaks multiple Indian languages fluently.

Trained on over 2 trillion tokens, Krutrim accomplishes better performance on multiple global LLM evaluation benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, BBH, PIQA and ARC.

Krutrim model can fluently switch between languages and discuss nuanced topics ranging from poetry in Bengali, to Bollywood movies, to creative masala dosa recipes.

Krutrim will be available in beta version for consumers in February 2024.

Additionally, it will also be available as an API for enterprises and developers, seeking to create AI applications.