Ola’s AI venture has faced controversies right from the start of this year, beginning with the suicide of a tech employee and now the layoffs. According to a report by The Economic Times, Ola’s Krutrim has laid off around 50 employees from its linguistics division, including team leads and transcribers across regional languages such as Bengali, Malayalam, and Punjabi. This marks the third round of layoffs since June.
So far, over 200 employees have left the company following layoffs and leadership exits, according to people familiar with the matter.
The layoffs come as Krutrim develops its largest language model, Krutrim 3, a multibillion-parameter system. Krutrim’s AI models are trained on multilingual image-text datasets spanning 10 Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Assamese along with English.
In a statement to the media, the company said the job cuts are part of a “strategic realignment” aimed at building leaner teams focused on its AI platform, adding that the data annotation phase involving linguistics work has now been completed. Since April, at least six senior leaders, including heads of AI data, software engineering, cloud architecture, and corporate finance, have resigned. This follows more than 20 earlier departures across levels in FY25.
Founded in 2023, Krutrim has raised $50 million and reached a $1 billion valuation, becoming India’s first AI start-up unicorn. The funding round was led by Matrix Partners India, an early backer of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.
