Krutrim AI Expands Teams Amid Leadership Exodus

Krutrim AI is ramping up hiring for its AI labs even as it continues to see exits, including that of senior resources.

The company is actively recruiting for multiple roles across its AI labs based in Bengaluru, the US (California), and Singapore. Recently listed roles, which are no longer accepting applications, include GenAI research engineer, research scientist for speech and audio recognition, and AI cloud platform engineer.

These hiring efforts reflect Krutrim’s drive to deepen its technical capabilities in generative AI, speech processing, and cloud infrastructure. The company also appointed Sunit S as senior vice president-product, indicating an increased focus on product leadership.

Significant Churn Across Leadership and Technical Roles

In the past year, Krutrim has seen close to a dozen junior to senior management-level exits even as the company doubles down on AI initiatives.

Among the recent senior-level departures is Ashish Kumar, who was applied AI director and focused on agentic AI for enterprise applications. He exited in early 2024 and is now head of platforms for AI and data at Tata Group. Other exits include Vipul Shah, who served as vice president-products; Gautam Bhargava, who was vice president and head of AI engineering; Ravi Jain, business head; and Priyanka Nayak, who was senior engineering manager and left in January after 18 months.

The departure of key leaders, particularly from core applied AI teams, raises questions about the company’s R&D stability and long-term team retention.

Large-Scale Investment Signals Intent to Lead India’s AI Ecosystem

Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has publicly stated a significant financial commitment to Krutrim AI labs, with an investment of Rs 2,000 crore announced and a plan to step this up to Rs 10,000 crore next year.

Krutrim’s stated mission is to build the full AI stack for India — from frontier AI model development and AI Cloud to silicon design. This indicates a comprehensive and long-term strategy.

The company has released several AI models, including Krutrim 2 LLM, the vision language model Chitrarth 1, and the speech language model Dhwani.

Aggarwal announced that Krutrim is providing the open-source community access to its work, suggesting a strategy of fostering collaboration and potentially accelerating development.

Product Expansion Aligns With Broader Market Momentum

Krutrim launched its AI lab earlier this year, shortly after announcing that it would host open-source models from Chinese company DeepSeek on its cloud platform.

It has since released a suite of models tailored to Indian language and user contexts, including Krutrim 2 and Krutrim 1 LLMs, Chitrarth, Dhwani, Vyakhyarth 1, and Krutrim Translate 1. The company has also developed BharatBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI model effectiveness in Indian use cases.

The Indian generative AI sector has attracted over $1.2 billion in funding since 2014, and the market is projected to cross $17 billion by 2030.

The Indian government is also actively promoting AI development through initiatives like the IndiaAI mission and the AIKosha platform, creating a supportive ecosystem for companies like Krutrim.

Company Reaffirms Commitment to Long-Term AI Vision

A Krutrim spokesperson confirmed ongoing hiring efforts and reiterated the company’s long-term mission. “There is a lot of interest amongst top talent globally towards this mission, and we are bringing together exceptional minds from India, Singapore, Silicon Valley to help shape this future of AI.”

The spokesperson also emphasized the return of Sunit S to the company and expressed confidence in his leadership to drive path-breaking work together at Krutrim.