Bhavish Aggarwal stood before the press in December 2023 with a bold promise to build an Indian rival to the American firm OpenAI. He called his firm Krutrim. And within 45 days, the company raised 50 million dollars and became the first AI unicorn in the country after a fast-funding round.
But money became the primary hurdle as Aggarwal relied on his own cash and one small injection of capital from outside sources. Now building frontier models is expensive and Anthropic says it costs over one billion dollars to train a single modern system in today's market.
Global investors stayed focused on Silicon Valley and largely ignored Indian hardware teams that lacked the massive scale of Western rivals. The tech hit a wall when the public tested the Krutrim chatbot in February 2024 and found it failed basic math. Yet it made historical errors.
Some users claimed the bot used old OpenAI code and the team blamed messy data for the many technical setbacks they faced. Then GPT-4o arrived and spoke Indian languages better than the local rival. So, the selling point vanished.
Aggarwal bought Bodhi Computing to design silicon, but he could not secure factory space from the Taiwan giant TSMC during the supply crunch. And the chip giant required massive cash up front and the designs stayed on paper while the bills continued to mount for the firm.
They changed the plan. In late 2025, Krutrim paused its chip work and stopped training its own base models to become a cloud provider for other businesses. They now sell GPU time and hosting tools to enterprise clients, and the strategy is already paying off with new contracts.
It works. Revenue tripled in the 2026 fiscal year to reach 300 crore rupees as the company reported its first net profit to investors. They serve 25 major clients now including firms in the telecom and financial sectors that need local data storage for their records.
Nandan Nilekani says this is the right path because India should build apps instead of expensive models that cost too much. But Vishal Sikka warns that the country cannot build a future on foreign tech without losing its sovereignty in the digital age.
For now, Aggarwal is choosing profit.
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