Ola’s Krutrim Cuts 50 Jobs in Linguistics Team: Report

Ola’s AI division, Krutrim, has fired approximately 50 members of its linguistics research team, the third round of retrenchment since June 2025. The team leads and transcribers serving a regional language like Bengali, Malayalam, and Punjabi are affected.

The most recent wave of layoffs has taken the number of employees who have been downsized by Krutrim to over 200 employees in this year alone, indicating that the company is in the process of restructuring itself. The company previously made 100-plus employees redundant in July in the second round of layoffs in an effort to develop leaner teams.

Strategic Reshuffle and AI Focus

As per reports, Krutrim noted that the layoffs were a strategic repositioning as it began to strengthen its emphasis on its AI platform. The company claimed that the linguistic data annotation project was completed, which is the end of this stage of the AI development process of the company.

The reorganization is part of Krutrim's long-term mission of developing its AI products, such as Krutrim 3, a multibillion-parameter language model that the company hopes to scale up to larger-scale capabilities.

Along with those lay-offs, there has been a high turnover in leadership at Krutrim. At least six senior executives across key critical functions, including AI data, cloud architecture, and software engineering, have left since April 2025. It comes after complaints raised previously of more than 20 exits on different levels in the company throughout the financial year.

 These exits have brought up questions about the internal stability of the start-up, which is still grappling with its own issues on the growth front.

Even with such a huge vision, AI products produced by Krutrim have not taken any substantial steps in the market. Its flagship AI cloud platform, Krutrim Cloud, and its large language model continue to address technology gaps that have slowed adoption.

Its AI assistant application, Kruti, released in June 2025, has already been downloaded approximately 207,000 times and is still a long way away from the growth benchmarks that competitors in the industry have reached.

Investment, Expansion, and Future Plans

In January 2024, Krutrim joined the unicorn club and attracted $75M of funding. The company also promised to scale up its data center capacity to 1 GW in 2028 and has already funded its future growth to up to 1.2 billion dollars in the coming years.

More recently, the startup acquired BharatSahAIyak, an AI solution-oriented company with a background in the public sector, to expand its scope and reach in the new Indian AI market.

One of the ambitious ambitions of Krutrim is to create AI silicon chips by the year 2026, a project that will address complex AI tasks more effectively. The development of AI infrastructure and data-driven solutions will help the company to be a leader in the fast-growing AI market in India.

Although the restructuring Krutrim is currently undergoing might not be easy, it is aimed at its long-term AI innovation vision. The development of its AI architecture, including silicon chips and sophisticated cloud services, is an investment that the company is making and will contribute to its expansion over the next few years. To guarantee its success in a competitive and fast-paced industry, Krutrim will have to overcome internal factors, such as talent retention and the finalisation of its large-scale AI models.