AI venture Krutrim struggles with senior talent exits over the past year

Krutrim, an artificial intelligence (AI) venture co-founded by Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola, has seen the departure of few executives who were in leadership roles and many senior employees in the last one year, according to the sources.

 

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). The development was first reported by The Economic Times.

 

These exits happened last year and this kind of churn is not unusual at a high-growth company,” said a person.

 

Bengaluru-based Krutrim has about 1000 employees and about 20 people including executives and senior employees may have left in the last one year, according to the sources.

 

A company spokesperson declined to comment on this development.

 

At the end of the last year, Ravi Jain, the business head of Krutrim quit after putting in around three years. Among the executives who have left the firm, Shah, Bhargava, and Jain were from senior management, while the others were from junior to mid-management levels. Last year, two more employees, Vishal Mahuli, who was leading data and AI engineering, and Utkarsh Garg, associate director of product, left the firm.

 

Early last year, Krutrim, achieved unicorn status — a term used to describe startups valued at $1 billion or above — following its inaugural funding round. The round, which saw participation from notable investors, such as Matrix Partners India, garnered investments worth $50 million in equity at a valuation of $1 billion.

 

Last month, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal announced an investment of Rs 2,000 crore  Krutrim, with a commitment to invest an additional Rs 10,000 crore by next year.

 

Furthermore, he announced the launch of KrutrimAI lab and said that  the company has released its work to the open-source community, while publishing several technical reports. This move follows DeepSeek’s recent decision to open-source its own generative AI (GenAI) model.

 

With this latest investment, Krutrim has raised close to $280 million.