Ola Krutrim's Kruti assistant goes dark across web and app stores amid reports of layoffs
Kruti, the agentic consumer assistant launched by Ola's AI arm Krutrim in 2025, has become inaccessible on the web, the App Store, Google Play and inside the Ola ecosystem, showing only a maintenance notice. The company has offered no explanation, while reports point to layoffs, senior exits and a stalled next-generation model.
Krutrim's consumer AI assistant Kruti has disappeared from every channel on which it was offered. Users attempting to reach it on the web, through the iOS and Android apps or within Ola's own platform are met with errors or a notice saying the service is under maintenance. The company has not provided a reason or a timeline for restoration.
Kruti was launched in 2025 as an agentic assistant able to complete real-world tasks such as booking cabs, paying bills and ordering food, with support for text, voice and images across several Indian languages. It was positioned as the consumer face of Krutrim, which became India's first AI unicorn in 2024 after a $50 million raise.
Reports surrounding the outage, which the company has not confirmed, describe layoffs including in the linguistics teams that underpin the assistant's Indian-language capability, departures at senior level, delays in fundraising and limited user adoption. Work on Krutrim 3, the planned successor to the company's 12-billion-parameter Krutrim-2 model, is said to have stalled.
The episode contrasts sharply with the momentum at Sarvam AI, which in the same fortnight signed a defence framework agreement and entered talks at a valuation of up to $4 billion. India's sovereign-AI field is narrowing, and execution rather than ambition is deciding who remains in it.
Why it matters
Consumer AI assistants are expensive to run and hard to monetise, and the Indian market has proved no exception. Kruti's withdrawal is a reminder that a foundation-model strategy needs a durable revenue line, whether enterprise, government or infrastructure, to survive the gap between launch and scale.
Indicops view
For buyers, the risk is dependency. A department or enterprise that had built workflows on Kruti would now be scrambling. We insist that every deployment we deliver can swap its underlying model within days, with prompts, evaluation suites and data pipelines held independently of any provider, so that a vendor's difficulties do not become a client's outage.