5 Indian AI Startups to Watch Out For in 2024 With India being a tech goldmine, the potential and possibilities are many. Let's take a look at five AI startups which came into the limelight and are showing massive potential
By Paromita Gupta •
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"I imagine a world in which AI is going to make us work more productively, live longer, and have cleaner energy," by Fei-Fei Li, the China-born American computer scientist and founder of ImageNet, best summarizes the impact we wish AI to have on our future. And several corporations and startups are working towards it.
It was estimated that there were 57,933 AI companies which operated around the world at the end of 2023. On the native front, the official number oscillates between 100 and 296. Indian AI startups were reported to have raised funding worth USD 560 Million across 25 funding rounds in 2023.
With India being a tech goldmine, the potential and possibilities are many. Let's take a look at five AI startups which came into the limelight and are showing massive potential.
Krutrim AI- Back in June 2023, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal was first reported to likely enter the AI ecosystem. In December he launched Krutrim, India's own and first AI company focused on building the complete AI computing stack and unveiled its base Large Language Model (LLM). In January, it became India's first AI unicorn.
It raised USD 50 million from key investors, including Matrix Partners India.
Ola Krutrim is trained on over 2T tokens representing the Indic language and supports all 22 scheduled languages.
Perplexity AI- While Aravind Srinivas' Perplexity AI first raised capital of USD 3.1 million in September 2022 and later in March 2023, it came into the limelight in January 2024 when it raised USD 73.6 million from a group of investors including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos.
Deemed as a Google counterpart, Perplexity AI allows users to get immediate answers to questions along with relevant sources and citations. Reportedly, it reached 10 million monthly active users and served over half a billion queries in 2023.
Earlier this month, it partnered with Carl Pei's Nothing to bring its AI offerings to its new offering Phone 2a, its first offering in the mid-range segment. The AI search engine startup is looking to finalize a new funding deal that would double its valuation to about USD one billion. In January, it sat on a sweet valuation of USD 522M.
Sarvam AI- Sarvam AI founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar is building the full-stack for Generative AI. In December, it raised USD 41 million in a Series A round from Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
It released the first open-source Hindi language model called OpenHathi-Hi-0.1, the first in a series which will "make contributions to the ecosystem with open models and datasets to encourage innovation in Indian language AI."
It has partnered with Microsoft to bring its Indic voice large language model (LLM) to Azure and with Meta to develop a Large Language Model (LLM) in vernacular languages for it. Additionally, it is set to launch a voice-to-voice endpoint tool in the next six to twelve months.
Karya AI- Manu Chopra, Vivek Seshadri, and Safiya Hussain founded Karya AI more with the intention of making an impact rather making profits. "Our goal is use technology as a means to provide opportunities to disadvantaged communities. We identify and train workers who need work the most and pay them 20 times the minimum wage, ensuring that our data solutions contribute positively to both technology and society," the startup reads as its mission.
It stemmed out of Microsoft Research in 2017 and currently has crossed 35,000 rural Indians with 40M+ paid in digital tasks. Microsoft, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Google are all tapping into it to gather speech data.
CoRover AI- CoRover.ai founded by Ankush Sabharwal in December launched BharatGPT, a Indian language generative AI platform in association with Google as tech partner. The model supports voice modality in 12+ Indian languages and text modality in 22 languages. It also has partenred with BHASINI and is providing AI Virtual Assistants to prominent organizations like IRCTC, LIC, IGL, and NPCI.
A few of its offerings include eSevak, an AI-based WhatsApp chatbot, and CoroAssist, a Secure GenAI Co-Pilot for Enterprise Information Retrieval.
