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

Krutrim, an artificial intelligence (AI) enterprise co-founded by Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola, has experienced the departure of several executives in leadership positions, as well as numerous senior employees over the past year, according to sources.

Among those who have left the organization are Vipul Shah (Vice President of Products), Gautam Bhargava (Vice President and Head of AI Engineering), Samrat Saha (Director of Machine Learning), Achal Kumar Mall (Director of Product Management), Mikhil Raj (Senior Director of Product Management), and Ashok Jagannathan (Vice President). This development was initially reported by The Economic Times.

These departures occurred last year, and such turnover is not uncommon in a rapidly growing company, stated an insider. Based in Bengaluru, Krutrim employs approximately 1,000 individuals, with around 20, including executives and senior staff, having departed in the last year, according to the sources.

A spokesperson for the company declined to provide comments on this matter. At the end of the previous year, Ravi Jain, the business head of Krutrim, resigned after nearly three years with the firm. Among the executives who have exited, Shah, Bhargava, and Jain held senior management positions, while the others were in junior to mid-management roles. Additionally, last year saw the departure of two more employees: Vishal Mahuli, who was leading data and AI engineering, and Utkarsh Garg, Associate Director of Product.

Last month, Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of Ola, announced an investment of Rs 2,000 crore in Krutrim, with a pledge to invest an additional Rs 10,000 crore by the following year. Furthermore, he unveiled the launch of the KrutrimAI lab and indicated that the company has made its work available to the open-source community, alongside publishing several technical reports. This initiative follows DeepSeek’s recent decision to open-source its own generative AI (GenAI) model.