Ola’s artificial intelligence (AI) arm Krutrim has seen the departure of at least half a dozen executives who were in leadership roles and over a dozen other employees in the past year, ET has learnt.
The executives who have left the firm include Vipul Shah (vice president, products), Gautam Bhargava (vice president, head of AI engineering), Samrat Saha (director, machine learning), Achal Kumar Mall (director of product management), Mikhil Raj (senior director of product management), and Ashok Jagannathan (vice president).
Most of the exits took place between March and November 2024, some quitting within a year of joining the firm and a few leaving in a matter of months.
ET reported last year that Ravi Jain, who was brought in from Ola Electric in May 2023 as business head, had left the firm. Jain’s LinkedIn shows he quit in November.
Of the seven executives, while Shah, Bhargava and Jain were from senior management, the rest were from junior- to mid-management levels, said a company executive on the condition of anonymity.
Two more employees—Vishal Mahuli, who was leading data and AI Engineering, and Utkarsh Garg, associate director, product —left the firm last year.
The dozen other employees who left included members of the founding team, according to LinkedIn updates of the respective employees.
Ola did not respond to queries.
This comes at a critical time for the company, which is doubling down on its AI ambitions.
Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal first announced Krutrim in December 2023, launching a large language model (LLM) that could support 10 Indian languages. The Krutrim chatbot was launched in February 2024. Since then, Aggarwal has expanded the scope of the AI arm.
From building LLMs, the company forayed into Krutrim Cloud in May 2024. That same month, Aggarwal said on X that Ola had moved all its workload from Microsoft Azure to Krutrim Cloud.
In August 2024, Aggarwal announced Krutrim was developing chips to accelerate AI and computing applications. The first chip Bodhi-1 will be launched in 2026 and two years after that, Bodhi-2, he had announced then.
Early last month, Aggarwal said Ola is investing ₹2,000 crore in Krutrim AI Labs with a commitment to step this up to ₹10,000 crore next year. Aggarwal posted on X that Krutrim was giving the open-source community access to its work. He also released the Krutrim 2 LLM, vision language model Chitrarth 1, and speech language model Dhwani.
Group company Ola Electric, which is India’s biggest electric two-wheeler maker, had also been hit by a series of top-level exits. Chief technology officer Suvonil Chatterjee and chief marketing officer Anshul Khandelwal had quit in December 2024, resulting in Ola Electric shares falling 3%.
Krutrim became a unicorn, a startup that is valued at $1 billion, in January 2024, when it raised $50 million from Z47, previously Matrix Partners.
The executives who have left the firm include Vipul Shah (vice president, products), Gautam Bhargava (vice president, head of AI engineering), Samrat Saha (director, machine learning), Achal Kumar Mall (director of product management), Mikhil Raj (senior director of product management), and Ashok Jagannathan (vice president).
Most of the exits took place between March and November 2024, some quitting within a year of joining the firm and a few leaving in a matter of months.
ET reported last year that Ravi Jain, who was brought in from Ola Electric in May 2023 as business head, had left the firm. Jain’s LinkedIn shows he quit in November.
Of the seven executives, while Shah, Bhargava and Jain were from senior management, the rest were from junior- to mid-management levels, said a company executive on the condition of anonymity.
Two more employees—Vishal Mahuli, who was leading data and AI Engineering, and Utkarsh Garg, associate director, product —left the firm last year.
The dozen other employees who left included members of the founding team, according to LinkedIn updates of the respective employees.
Ola did not respond to queries.
This comes at a critical time for the company, which is doubling down on its AI ambitions.
Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal first announced Krutrim in December 2023, launching a large language model (LLM) that could support 10 Indian languages. The Krutrim chatbot was launched in February 2024. Since then, Aggarwal has expanded the scope of the AI arm.
From building LLMs, the company forayed into Krutrim Cloud in May 2024. That same month, Aggarwal said on X that Ola had moved all its workload from Microsoft Azure to Krutrim Cloud.
In August 2024, Aggarwal announced Krutrim was developing chips to accelerate AI and computing applications. The first chip Bodhi-1 will be launched in 2026 and two years after that, Bodhi-2, he had announced then.
Early last month, Aggarwal said Ola is investing ₹2,000 crore in Krutrim AI Labs with a commitment to step this up to ₹10,000 crore next year. Aggarwal posted on X that Krutrim was giving the open-source community access to its work. He also released the Krutrim 2 LLM, vision language model Chitrarth 1, and speech language model Dhwani.
Group company Ola Electric, which is India’s biggest electric two-wheeler maker, had also been hit by a series of top-level exits. Chief technology officer Suvonil Chatterjee and chief marketing officer Anshul Khandelwal had quit in December 2024, resulting in Ola Electric shares falling 3%.
Krutrim became a unicorn, a startup that is valued at $1 billion, in January 2024, when it raised $50 million from Z47, previously Matrix Partners.
