India, May 10 -- In June 2023, on a visit to India, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman said Indian startups looking to build ChatGPT rivals with just a few million dollars will most likely fail. Ola Consumer and Ola Electric founder Bhavish Aggarwal responded saying an Indian company will one day prove him wrong.

Aggarwal, who has openly criticised tech giants in the past, rejected the idea that India could not build foundational AI models that ChatGPT relied on.

In the following weeks and months, Aggarwal set about incorporating Ola Krutrim, raised funds from long-time Ola investor Matrix (now Z47) and positioned it as India's own sovereign LLM. Krutrim became a unicorn almost exactly one year after Altman had said Indian startups cou...