What a miss! Ola's Krutrim fails to hail a ride at India's biggest AI summit

Days before the India AI Impact Summit 2026 opened at Bharat Mandapam, Bhavish Aggarwal’s AI venture Krutrim signalled an aggressive presence.

“India’s AI shift is moving from experimentation to real production scale,” the company wrote in a LinkedIn post inviting attendees to visit its booth. It promised to showcase how Krutrim integrates AI models and cloud infrastructure “in one platform” to help organisations move from idea to deployment. The company listed Hall 4, Booth 28 as its location and asked enterprises, developers and policymakers to “drop by and meet the team.”

But when thousands of delegates and AI enthusiasts arrived at India’s flagship AI gathering, Krutrim was largely absent from the main stage.

No senior executives appeared on panel discussions, no major product announcements were made and there was little evidence of the high-profile showcase suggested in its pre-event outreach. The company declined to comment when contacted by Business Today about its absence.

From flagship player to missing voice

The no-show is striking because Krutrim has positioned itself as India’s leading homegrown AI player. Founded in 2023, it became the country’s first AI unicorn in January 2024 and announced plans to build a full-stack ecosystem spanning foundation models, cloud infrastructure and consumer applications.

Its portfolio includes the Krutrim large language model, Krutrim Cloud for AI compute, and Kruti, an agentic assistant designed to perform tasks such as booking services and handling workflows.

The summit, dominated by discussions on sovereign AI, domestic infrastructure and enterprise adoption, would have been a natural stage for the company to showcase its progress.

Meanwhile, rivals seized the spotlight with fresh launches: Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, conversational AI firm Gnani.ai and the IIT-Bombay-led BharatGen consortium unveiled new large language and voice models built to be trained, deployed and governed entirely within India.

Internal turbulence casts a shadow

Krutrim’s subdued presence comes amid signs of organisational churn over the past year.

Bhavish Aggarwal’s AI startup has undergone multiple rounds of layoffs in 2025, primarily affecting its linguistics team, a critical component for building Indic AI systems. In June, dozens of employees were let go as part of a “strategic realignment.” In July, more than 100 roles were cut, followed by another round in September that reportedly affected about 50 employees.

In total, nearly 200 employees have been laid off since its founding.

The company has also reportedly seen a string of senior departures. Since April, at least six high-level executives, including leaders in AI data, cloud architecture, corporate finance and software engineering, have reportedly exited.

Products still seeking traction

Despite ambitious launches, Krutrim’s products are yet to demonstrate widespread adoption.

Its foundation models operate in a crowded field where performance benchmarks and ecosystem support are crucial.

Kruti, the company’s consumer assistant app launched in mid-2025, has crossed roughly 100,000 downloads on Google Play since launch, modest traction compared with global AI assistants or even some domestic applications. By contrast, Indus by Sarvam, launched last week, has already crossed 50,000 downloads in less than a week.

The big picture

In a year when India’s AI ambitions moved from hype to deployment, Krutrim’s absence created a vacuum that competitors were quick to fill.

For a company that once set the pace as India’s first AI unicorn, the question now is whether it is preparing a bigger leap or watching the field compress around it.