Five AI Startups In India To Keep An Eye On In 2024

The quote “I imagine a world in which AI is going to make us work more productively, live longer, and have cleaner energy,” from Fei-Fei Li, an American computer scientist and founder of ImageNet who was born in China, best captures the vision we have for AI’s role in our future. 5 Indian AI Startups to Watch Out For in 2024). And a number of businesses and startups are aiming for it.

By the end of 2023, it was projected that 57,933 AI businesses were active worldwide. The official figure on the native front varies from 100 to 296. According to reports, 25 financing rounds totaling USD 560 million were held by Indian AI startups in 2023.

India is a tech treasure trove, therefore there are a ton of opportunities. Let’s examine five AI businesses that recently gained attention and have enormous promise.

Krutrim AI: Bhavish Aggarwal, the creator of Ola, was first rumored to be entering the AI ecosystem back in June 2023. He established Krutrim, the first AI startup in India, in December with the goal of developing the full AI computing stack and releasing its foundational Large Language Model (LLM). It turned into the first AI unicorn in India in January.

Important investors, such as Matrix Partners India, contributed USD 50 million to the cause.

Ola Krutrim supports all 22 scheduled languages and has been trained on over 2T tokens that comprise the Indic language.

Perplexity AI: Initially raising USD 3.1 million in September 2022 and again in March 2023, Aravind Srinivas’s Perplexity AI first gained attention in January 2024 when it raised USD 73.6 million from a consortium of investors that included Jeff Bezos and Nvidia.

Perplexity AI, regarded as Google’s equivalent, enables users to obtain prompt answers to inquiries along with pertinent references and citations. In 2023, it reportedly served over half a billion queries and had 10 million active monthly users.

It collaborated with Carl Pei’s Nothing earlier this month to introduce its AI solutions on Phone 2a, the company’s debut mid-range product. The AI search engine firm hopes to close a fresh funding agreement that will raise its estimated worth to $1 billion USD. It was valued at a staggering USD 522 million in January.

Sarvam AI: Founded by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, Sarvam AI is developing the entire generative AI stack. It received USD 41 million in December from Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures as part of a Series A financing.

OpenHathi-Hi-0.1, the first of a series of models that would “make contributions to the ecosystem with open models and datasets to encourage innovation in Indian language AI,” was made available as an open-source project.

It has collaborated with Meta to create a Large Language Model (LLM) in vernacular languages for Azure and with Microsoft to bring its Indic speech LLM to the platform. In the upcoming six to twelve months, a voice-to-voice endpoint product will also be launched.

Karya AI: Manu Chopra, Vivek Seshadri, and Safiya Hussain launched Karya AI with the goal of having a greater social impact than financial gain. Our objective is to give underprivileged populations possibilities through the use of technology. The business states that its goal is to “identify, train, and compensate workers who need work the most, paying them 20 times the minimum wage, ensuring that our data solutions contribute positively to both technology and society.”

It started with Microsoft Research in 2017 and has since expanded to 35,000 Indian rural residents with over 40 million paid digital assignments. It is being used by Google, Microsoft, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to collect voice data.

CoRover AI: Ankush Sabharwal started CoRover.ai in December, and the company, along with Google, is a technology partner, developed BharatGPT, an Indian language generative AI platform. The device is compatible with text in 22 languages and voice in more than 12 Indian languages. Notable companies like IRCTC, LIC, IGL, and NPCI are receiving AI virtual assistants from it thanks to a partnership with BHASINI.

Among its products are CoroAssist, a Secure GenAI Co-Pilot for Enterprise Information Retrieval, and eSevak, an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot.