Who was Nikhil Somwanshi? Krutrim employee who died by suicide, as colleague alleges ‘extreme work pressure’

The alleged suicide of Nikhil Somwanshi, an engineer at Ola’s artificial intelligence arm, Krutrim, has gained spotlight after another employee of the company took to the social media platform Reddit and alleged that the deceased was under “extreme work pressure”. 

His body was found in Agara Lake in Bengaluru on May 8, NDTV reported, citing the case FIR. 

According to the Reddit post, a user who claimed to be a coworker of Nikhil Somwanshi, and identified as only ‘Kirigawakazuto’, Nikhil committed suicide due to “extreme work pressure”.

The user alleged that two people had quit the company, leading to all work being pushed on him. He claimed working with the manager, especially for freshers, is “traumatic”.

Who was Nikhil Somwanshi?

Nikhil Somwanshi was a machine learning engineer with Krutrim, the artificial intelligence (AI) unit of Bhavish Aggrawal-led Ola.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he was a fresher and had worked with the company for 10 months, since August 2024. It further showed that he graduated from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in July 2024.

In terms of prior work experience, the profile showed he interned at Kotak Mahindra Bank in Bengaluru for three months in 2023, and then had an internship at the IISc as a Natural Language Processing Engineer for six months (from January to June 2024).

The IISc internship displayed Nikhil Somwanshi's work experience (part of his Master's thesis) on large language model (LLM) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based chatbot Saathi. It added that Saathi was funded by the Melinda Gates Foundation.

The chatbot also participated in a collaboration between IISc Bangalore, Oxford Brookes University in the UK, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Akaike Technologies on 200 government schemes.

What did the company say?

A spokesperson told PTI on May 18 that Krutrim is “extending full support” to the deceased's family and “is in contact with authorities to offer assistance as needed”.

“We are deeply saddened by the tragic passing of one of our most talented young employees, Nikhil (Somwanshi), on the 8th of May. Our thoughts and heartfelt sympathies are with his family, friends, and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time. We are extending our full support to Nikhil's family and our employees during this time of grief. We are also in contact with the relevant authorities and will continue to offer our assistance as needed,” the spokesperson said.

According to the spokesperson, Nikhil Somwanshi was “on personal leave at the time of the incident”.

They added, “He had reached out to his manager on April 8, expressing that he needed rest, and was promptly granted personal time off. Later, on April 17, he shared that he was feeling better but would benefit from additional rest, and his leave was extended accordingly. We are heartbroken by this loss. Nikhil was a valued team member, and his absence will be deeply felt by all who knew and worked with him.”