BENGALURU:
Ola
founder and CEO
Bhavish Aggarwal
said that the company will move its workloads to its own
cloud platform
, Krutrim, as it plans to exit
Microsoft
‘s
Azure
within a week.
Ola has been a customer of Microsoft since 2017.
“Since
is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a significant customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own @Krutrim cloud within the next week.
It is a challenge, as all developers know, but my team is very excited about undertaking this. Any other developer who wants to move out of Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage, as long as you don’t return to Azure after that!” he wrote on X and in a blog post on Ola.
Krutrim, the AI unicorn founded by Aggarwal, has also opened up its cloud platform to enterprises, researchers, and developers for access to AI computing infrastructure, Krutrim’s foundational models, and open-source models hosted on its platform. In January, Krutrim raised $50 million in a funding round led by Matrix Partners India. Aggarwal said the funding was at a valuation of over $1 billion. This makes it perhaps India’s first unicorn in the pure AI space.
Aggarwal’s decision to leave Azure was triggered by a recent post on LinkedIn, where he criticized the use of the pronoun ‘they’ as an “illness.” LinkedIn removed the post for violating its professional community policies. Aggarwal expressed his belief that the pronoun issue represents a “woke political ideology of entitlement” that does not belong in India. “I wouldn’t have entered this debate, but LinkedIn has assumed that Indians need to adopt pronouns in our lives, and that we can’t criticize it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance. As a founder and CEO, this western DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) system significantly impacts my business as it fosters an entitlement mindset in our professional lives, and I will fight it,” he wrote on X.
Aggarwal emphasized the importance of
Indian tech platforms
, expressing his concern that his life would be governed by western Big Tech monopolies, leading to cultural subsumption. He clarified that his stance is not against global tech companies, but rather against the imposition of forced ideology as a free-thinking Indian.
To address this concern, Ola plans to collaborate with the Indian developer community to create a social media framework based on ONDC and UPI. “The only ‘community guidelines’ should be Indian law. No corporate entity should be able to decide what will be banned. Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by corporations who profit from our data and then lecture us on ‘community guidelines,'” he wrote on X.
