From record-breaking resilience on Mount Kilimanjaro to India’s AI roadmap, YourStory brings you the newest updates from the world of human excellence and synthetic intelligence.
Featured tales:
How stroke survivor Jayashree Mohan turned the quickest lady to ascend and descend Mount Kilimanjaro
In October final 12 months, Jayashree Vijay Mohan achieved two Guinness World Information within the CIH (Coordination impairment – hemiplegia) class—for the quickest ascent and descent of Mount Kilimanjaro by a feminine climber.
Behind this exceptional achievement lies a narrative of grit, resilience, and quiet dedication. It’s, in some ways, a triumph of thoughts and physique, and of a spirit that refuses to give up.
4 years earlier, Jayashree suffered a stroke, and what adopted was not a dramatic comeback, however months of sluggish, unsure rebuilding. She needed to relearn easy actions, together with standing up, strolling unaided, and trusting her personal steadiness. Learn extra.
Newest information:
Sarvam AI unveils two new LLMs; says 105B mannequin surpasses DeepSeek’s R1 and Google’s Gemini Flash on key benchmarks
Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam AI has launched two new giant language fashions, because it expands its position in India’s effort to construct home AI programs.
Talking on the India AI Affect Summit in Delhi, Sarvam AI Co-founder Pratyush Kumar mentioned the corporate has skilled a 30-billion-parameter mannequin and a 105-billion-parameter mannequin from scratch, utilizing a mixture-of-experts (MoE) structure to steadiness scale and effectivity. Learn extra.
Mukesh Ambani pledges Rs 10 lakh Cr for AI push, vows to make AI as low cost as information
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani unveiled plans to take a position Rs 10 lakh crore in AI over the following seven years, marking one of many largest commitments to AI infrastructure introduced in India.
Addressing the India AI Affect Summit, the Reliance Industries chairman positioned the initiative as the following part of Jio’s digital transformation playbook—this time aimed toward decreasing the price of computing energy and AI entry throughout the nation.
The funding, starting this 12 months, will likely be deployed by means of Jio and Reliance to construct what Ambani described as sovereign AI infrastructure at scale. “Jio, along with Reliance, will make investments Rs 10 lakh crore over the following seven years,” he mentioned, including that the capital outlay is “not speculative” however meant to create long-term financial and strategic worth. Learn extra.
Funding information:
EV charging community supplier Statiq raises $18M in funding spherical led by Tenacity Ventures
EV charging community Statiq raised $18 million in a recent funding spherical led by Tenacity Ventures, with participation from present traders Y Combinator and Shell Ventures, together with RCD Holdings.
The startup will use the brand new funds to scale its infrastructure and increase its presence throughout Tier I and II cities. It’ll additionally deploy a portion of the funds to assist increase DC quick chargers throughout its networks alongside key highways. It additionally goals to deploy the capital to enhance {hardware} lifecycle and superior telematics for scaling, in addition to assist exports to the UAE pilots.
Pluto Mobility raises $2M seed funding for last-mile EVs
Delhi-based Pluto Mobility raised $2 million in a seed spherical led by Model One Ventures, with participation from Grad Capital and founders and executives from Delhivery, OfBusiness, Pixxel, and Growth Supersonic.
Based by Akshat Bhatia and Himanshu Panda, the startup builds scooter-sized, totally lined electrical automobiles designed for supply workloads. Pluto mentioned its automobiles can carry “2x extra orders than a standard 2-wheeler” and are engineered “from the bottom up by rethinking core engineering and design round real-world supply use instances”.
“India’s last-mile problem isn’t velocity, incentives, or apps. It’s that supply operations are constructed on automobiles by no means designed for supply workloads,” mentioned Akshat Bhatia. Pilot deployments are deliberate for 2026.
Different information:
CoinDCX declares Rs 111 Cr ESOP buyback
CoinDCX introduced a Rs 111 crore ESOP buyback for over 500 present and former workers, calling it its largest liquidity occasion up to now.
“The Indian crypto trade has navigated an extremely demanding panorama,” mentioned Sumit Gupta. “This buyback is greater than only a monetary milestone; It’s our method of guaranteeing that those that stayed the course and fueled our mission can share within the tangible worth they’ve helped construct,” he mentioned.
Based in 2018, CoinDCX serves over 2 crore customers and expanded internationally by means of the acquisition of BitOasis. The corporate mentioned the transfer displays its monetary place and long-term technique.
NVIDIA, AI Grants India intention to help 500 startups
AI Grants India (AIGI) will collaborate with NVIDIA to help early-stage founders by means of the NVIDIA Inception programme, aiming to assist as much as 500 AI startups over the following 12 months.
The initiative is anticipated to help over 10,000 founders with entry to AI fashions, technical coaching and infrastructure. Startups will obtain steerage and entry to NVIDIA developer instruments and ecosystem advantages.
“India’s subsequent wave of AI innovation will likely be constructed by early groups which have the technical depth to execute, however want sooner entry to the best tooling, mentorship, and ecosystem pathways,” mentioned Bhasker (Bosky) Kode, Co-founder, AI Grants India.
“NVIDIA is accelerating this momentum by giving founders direct entry to accelerated computing,” mentioned Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups and Enterprise Capital at NVIDIA.
PhonePe rolls out biometric authentication for UPI funds
PhonePe launched biometric authentication for UPI funds, permitting customers to authorise transactions utilizing fingerprint or facial recognition for funds as much as Rs 5,000.
The fintech firm mentioned the characteristic leverages device-level biometric verification as a safe two-factor authentication layer and features a fallback to UPI PIN if biometric authentication fails. Transactions above Rs 5,000 will proceed to require a UPI PIN.
“At PhonePe, our aim has at all times been to make digital funds as intuitive and accessible as doable for each Indian,” mentioned Deep Agrawal, Head of Funds at PhonePe. “By integrating biometric authentication, we’re taking a major step towards a very frictionless fee expertise,” he mentioned.
The characteristic is at present out there for Android customers.
NxtGen AI deploys sovereign AI manufacturing unit with Vertiv infrastructure
NxtGen AI deployed a national-scale sovereign AI manufacturing unit in India, supported by Vertiv’s information centre infrastructure and accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.
The deployment consists of greater than 4,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs by means of Dell Built-in Rack Scalable Programs, operating on Dell PowerEdge XE9685L liquid-cooled servers. Vertiv is delivering energy and thermal programs, together with UPS, lithium-ion vitality storage, and liquid cooling.
“Constructing a national-scale AI Manufacturing unit requires not simply accelerated computing, however a resilient and scalable AI infrastructure basis,” mentioned A. S. Rajgopal, MD and CEO, NxtGen AI.
“Vertiv’s 360AI strategy allows NxtGen AI to deploy a extremely environment friendly, scalable, and future-ready infrastructure,” mentioned Subhasis Majumdar, Managing Director, Vertiv India.
Mirror Safety, NVIDIA associate on encrypted AI inference
Mirror Safety collaborated with NVIDIA to carry GPU-accelerated Absolutely Homomorphic Encryption to AI inference for regulated workloads.
The platform integrates NVIDIA CUDA, cuBLAS, NeMo, NeMo Retriever and TensorRT-LLM to allow encrypted AI inference and safe AI reminiscence. The businesses mentioned the strategy permits information to stay encrypted throughout computation and storage.
“Sovereignty is not about the place your information lives; it is about controlling what occurs to it when your intelligence runs,” mentioned Pankaj Thapa, Co-founder and CEO, Mirror Safety.
“NVIDIA is accelerating this momentum by giving founders direct entry to accelerated computing,” mentioned Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups and Enterprise Capital at NVIDIA.
(This text will likely be up to date with the newest information all through the day.)
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