Latest AI News
IndiaAI Mission-Backed Avataar.ai Launches Indigenous Video AI Model Varya
The company says its distilled architecture cuts video generation to four steps, lowering inference costs to ₹ 0.48 per second.
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Marine Robotics Co Rekise Bags $9.7M Led by Accel, Nikhil Kamath’s NKSquared
Rekise Marine will use the funding to finalise sea trials for its submarine, Jalkapi.
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Happiest Minds Launches Agentic AI Platform to Automate Software Engineering Tasks
The platform deploys autonomous software engineering agents across development workflows, signalling a shift from AI assistants to AI systems capable of executing end-to-end engineering tasks with human oversight.
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TCS Launches Oracle AI Data Lab in Kolkata, Plans Expansion to 4 More Cities
TCS’ Oracle AI Data Platform Lab marked a deeper push into enterprise AI and data modernisation.
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Keysight, Siemens Software Partner for AI-Led PLM Testing
The partnership brings AI-based test automation to Teamcenter users managing product lifecycle systems.
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Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale
India’s AI model output has been slow compared to the U.S., Europe, and China. Only a few startups are releasing models, and most of them are large language models or voice models. To encourage more development, the government launched theIndia AI Mission, a roughly $1.2 billion initiative that — among other things — gives selected startups access to subsidized GPU compute in exchange for releasing their models publicly. One of the 12 startups selected for the program,Avataar AI, has launched a new video model called Varya that is built to understand local context — such as identifying different festivals, food, and clothing. The Peak XV-backed startup, which focuses oncreating video tools for e-commerce, didn’t build Varya from scratch. It started with Wan 2.2, a publicly available video generation model released by Alibaba, and used a technique called distillation — essentially compressing the model’s capabilities into a leaner, faster version optimized for Avataar’s specific use cases. The result is a model that runs in four steps rather than Wan 2.2’s 50, producing video 10 times faster and at a fraction of the cost. To put that in concrete terms: using an NVIDIA H200 GPU, Varya can generate a 5-second 720p clip in 45 seconds, compared to 1,230 seconds for Wan 2.2. The most striking aspect of Varya may be its price. The company plans to charge ₹0.48 ($0.005) per second of video on its hosted service — far cheaper than models like Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway, which typically charge $0.10 or more per second. That’s a roughly 20x price difference. “India is a video-first market. We see this across every large consumer internet product in India: video wins over text. Current AI video models are too expensive for population-scale use in India. If video AI is going to reach students, teachers, MSMEs, creators, enterprises, and public services, costs have to come down dramatically. Cost is the biggest unlock for AI adoption in India,” Peak XV’s managing director Rajan Anandan told TechCrunch. Image and video generation models often miss cultural nuances and produce stereotyped or generic outputs — a problem TechCrunch hasreported on before. Avataar AI says it has used curated data to train Varya to recognize cultural nuances including food, clothing, architecture, and festivals. Varya will be released as an open-weight model onIndia’s AI Kosh portal— the Indian government’s centralized repository for publicly available AI models and datasets — along with its training data, meaning developers can self-host or modify it for their own needs. Avataar also plans to make the model available to its enterprise customers and says it is open to partnerships with video tools including Higgsfield and Adobe Firefly. Anyone can try it now on its website using text prompts or reference images. Varya’s launch reflects a fundamental tradeoff in India’s AI ambitions. Industry veterans have noted that India can make its mark in AI bycreating applicationsand a robustdeveloper ecosystemrather than competing on foundation models. And there’s a reason for that pragmatism: model development has been slower in India than in global rivals due to alack of computeand limited quality data availability. The India AI Mission is also part of a broader government push to close that gap. Last year, it selected 12 startups — Avataar AI among them — to develop AI models and provided them with cost-efficient compute. Earlier this year, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said India aims to attract$200 billionin AI investment by 2028 and more thandoubleits GPU capacity within six months.
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Why NVIDIA Needs SK Hynix More Than Ever
From HBM leader to trillion-dollar giant, SK Hynix has become a critical pillar of the AI supply chain.
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OpenAI Wants Codex Working Even When the Laptop is Closed
OpenAI is acquiring Ona to give Codex persistent cloud environments, allowing AI agents to continue working on tasks long after users leave a session.
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Salesforce Says the Future of Enterprise AI is ‘Headless’
Salesforce sees APIs, data integration, and context as the foundation for AI to deliver insights directly into workflows.
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NEURA Robotics Raises Up To $1.4 Billion in Series C, Largest Ever for a Full-Stack Robotics Company
The German robotics startup has secured funding from Tether, Amazon, and NVIDIA, among others, to expand its global presence and aims to produce millions of robots by 2030.
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Jeff Bezos’s Prometheus raises $12B to build an ‘artificial general engineer’ for the physical world
Prometheus, the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit, announced it raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation. The new funds came from Bezos himself, as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others. This is the second fundraise round for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial raise of $6.2 billion,according to CNBC. Prometheus is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer” — software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds. The ambition is sweeping: replace large swaths of engineering work with AI. Although the startup will automate many aspects of an engineer’s job, Bezos told CNBC that the productivity gains AI delivers will lead to what he calls “labor scarcity” — his term for a world where demand for human workers outpaces supply. That puts him at odds with a number of prominent voices in tech. While some AI leaders predict widespread job losses, Bezos sees it differently. “Significant productivity in the economy is going to raise the standard of living,” he said. “People who today have two-earner households, they’ll become one-earner households. Maybe some people who are working overtime will stop working overtime.” The company, which currently has 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich, is keeping the specifics of what it has already built under wraps. Bezos indicated that a large portion of the capital will go toward the company’s large compute needs. Bezos knows something about labor at scale. Amazon — where he serves as executive chairman and is the largest individual shareholder — employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide and over the past year, under CEO Andy Jassy, has laid offtens of thousandsof people as the company has accelerated its own automation push. At $41 billion, Prometheus is one of the most richly valued AI startups ever funded, and one of the largest single bets on the physical AI sector. But it isn’t the only company attracting massive investor interest. In recent months, venture capitalists have increasinglypoured capital into physical AI, a booming sector that investors and founders argue is inherently more defensible than pure software — because the physical world creates moats that code alone cannot.
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Theker just raised $85M to build the factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything
Humanoids aren’t quite ready to replace factory workers, but the industry can’t wait. Faced with labor shortages, manufacturers have shown growing interest in startups that promise faster automation without the usual tradeoffs. That’s the bet behindTheker, an AI robotics startup that aims to go beyond robots trained for a single task. “If you always have to put the same cookie in the same box, that works perfectly, but most processes aren’t like that,” co-founder Carla Gómez Cano told TechCrunch. Theker is designed for that messier reality. Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — thinkBoston Dynamics— Theker’s machines are built to be reconfigured. Their hands, arms, and overall form can be swapped out or resized depending on the task, whether that’s sorting packages, packing clothing, or handling bottles and cans in a warehouse. That Inditex, Zara’s parent company, signed on as an early backer is a signal of where Theker’s ambitions start, not where they end. The company’s broader goal is to move beyond retail into heavier industrial settings like manufacturing, where the complexity and scale of manual tasks is even greater. This generalist ambition has helped cement Theker’s status as one ofEurope’s hot startups to watch— and raise capital accordingly. The Barcelona-based startup has just raised $85 million in what it’s calling “Europe’s largest ever robotics Series A.” (We haven’t found a larger one in our records, either.) Less than a year aftera record seed round, this Series A was led by American VC firm CRV and backed by a mix of traditional and strategic investors, including Samsung and Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle tied to LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault. Gómez Cano said Samsung is not a client yet but that the two are in advanced discussions. Theker would welcome having the Korean company as a customer, supplier, and investor simultaneously — a trifecta that would give the startup both revenue and credibility in manufacturing at scale. She also noted that she and co-founder Jiaqiang Ye Zhu “didn’t build Theker to run pilots,” so the team skips innovation departments entirely and goes straight to logistics or operations, where deals are real and timelines are shorter. To demonstrate that the company can actually deliver on that, Theker has a showroom in central Barcelona, and plans to open others as it expands across Europe, the U.S. and Asia. It will also grow its headcount across tech, deployment, and sales. “We already received 15,000 job applications and have to filter like crazy,” Gómez Cano said. She estimated that the team could grow from dozens to up to 120 people by the end of the year, then caught herself: “I am saying that, but I also said that we’d raise $30 or $40 million!” That Theker managed to raise twice its target also reinforces the startup’s conviction in keeping its HQ in Barcelona, a growingrobotics hub, and in Europe’s tech ecosystem more broadly. “It has never been a barrier to acceleration for us, so we are making the most of it,” Gómez Cano said.
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