Krutrim, India’s first artificial intelligence unicorn, has laid off around 20 to 25 employees in its second round of job cuts this year as it doubles down on AI infrastructure and cloud services.
The latest reductions have hit product and engineering teams, according to a report by The Economic Times. Earlier in 2026, the Ola-backed company had trimmed headcount across sales, go-to-market and business operations as part of an organisational restructuring. Responding to media queries, Krutrim did not confirm how many people were affected.
The company framed the move as routine recalibration rather than retrenchment. It said it periodically reviews its structure to keep teams aligned with shifting business priorities as it continues to scale, a statement it has repeated through successive rounds of cuts.
The pattern stretches back more than a year. In July 2025, Krutrim reportedly eliminated over 100 roles while several senior executives exited. A separate exercise in September that year affected roughly 50 employees in its linguistics division, including people building regional-language AI models. The current cuts extend a run of workforce changes that has become a defining feature of the company’s growth story.
Behind the reductions sits a deliberate strategic shift. In May, Krutrim announced a sharper focus on becoming an AI cloud services provider for the Indian market, leaning into infrastructure, cloud computing and enterprise solutions. The layoffs read as the workforce side of that repositioning, with the company reshaping teams around cloud and infrastructure rather than its earlier, broader AI ambitions.
The financials complicate the layoff narrative. Despite repeated cuts, Krutrim reported revenue of around ₹300 crore in FY26, nearly three times the previous year. That combination of rising revenue and shrinking headcount will sharpen an already live debate in India’s tech sector about whether AI-led firms are building leaner by design or simply struggling to hold talent through constant pivots.
