Рубрика: AI

ALCF Opens Call for AI-in-Science Collaboration Program, Deadline Feb. 27

Jan. 20, 2026 — The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) invites proposals for a new collaboration…

Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Bolna has secured $6.3 million in a seed funding round led by General Catalyst.

This funding round also featured participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and Eight Capital, as well as angel investors Aarthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer, and Taro Fukuyama, among others.

The startup will use the fresh capital to enhance its engineering and deployment teams, invest in its own AI and machine learning technologies to facilitate vernacular voice interactions, and bolster enterprise-level infrastructure to support large-scale production deployments.

Since its initial commercial launch in May 2025, Bolna has grown from managing approximately 1,500 calls per day to over 200,000, it said in a statement. The company now boasts more than 1,050 paying customers across industries such as e-commerce, BFSI, logistics, recruitment, and education.

Bolna serves a diverse range of clients, including large companies like Varun Beverages and startups such as Spinny and Snabbit. The startup enables high-volume voice processing as well as specialised, voice-dependent sectors such as travel and matrimonial services, where multilingual voice interactions are the primary mode of communication.

In September, Bolna was accepted into the Fall 2025 cohort of Y Combinator.

“The biggest thing to happen to Bolna as soon as we entered YC was gaining confidence in building for India. We spoke to alumni and successful founders who followed their gut and took well-calculated risks, without worrying about what investors or industry experts might say,” Maitreya Wagh, founder and CEO at Bolna, told AIM.

Bolna’s orchestration layer enables businesses to run voice AI systems in multiple languages and scenarios on a single platform. Designed for high-volume telephony, it helps maintain consistent performance as call volumes grow.

“Earlier, we thought a self-serve tool would be used only by indie developers and growth-stage startups. We changed our focus to building a product that can be used even by veterans, CXOs and PMs at large Indian enterprises who may not have prior experience with AI or prompting,” Wagh added.

The company has focused on hiring forward-deployed engineers to train key decision-makers in developing and managing voice AI agents. This initiative has led to launches with two publicly listed companies and pilot programmes with five others.

Its monthly revenue increased from $20,000 in September to $56,000 by December 2025, the statement said. The enterprise pipeline is projected to reach $3 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the coming months, and with more enterprises on board, the company aims to achieve its 2026 ARR target of $5 million by June.

The post Bengaluru Voice AI Startup Bolna Grabs $6.3 Mn to Enhance Vernacular Calls appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

BSC Research Demonstrates How AI Improves Modeling of Complex Fluid Simulations

Jan. 20, 2026 — Simulations of turbulent flows are essential in fluid mechanics because they help…

Sensesemi Technologies has raised ₹25 crore in a seed funding round to accelerate the development of its edge AI chip architecture for industrial IoT, automotive systems, and medical devices.

The Bengaluru-based, DLI scheme-approved fabless semiconductor startup addresses on-device processing needs where power efficiency and real-time performance matter.

The round was led by Piper Serica, with participation from LetsVenture Angel Fund, Sun Icon Ventures, MyAsiaVC, Whitepine Investments, REAN Foundation, and Jain Oncor, along with angel investors including Niraj Shah and Deepak Khanna.

Sensesemi plans to use seed capital to advance its first system-on-chip designs and move towards commercial deployments over the next few years. The funding will also support product development, chip tape-outs, team expansion, and partnerships with device makers.

In an exclusive interaction with AIM pre-funding, Vijay Muktamath, founder and chief executive officer of Sensesemi, said his background in analog and RF design shaped the company’s direction. “Most implantable devices or chips are always analog in nature,” he said, referring to his work on a retinal implant project in Australia.

“Our approach is vertical integration of these functions on a single chip to reduce system complexity and power consumption,” he said, adding that customers also seek “secure, reliable supply chain access.”

Alongside its digital architecture, Sensesemi is developing an analog AI inference processor aimed at battery-operated and implantable devices. “Analog-domain AI inferencing allows us to achieve dramatic improvements in power efficiency,” said Namit Varma, the company’s co-founder and head of engineering, pointing to applications such as medical implants and industrial sensors.

Muktamath said capital availability remains a challenge for chip startups in India. “Ten years back, the funding was never available for any of the hardware, forget about the chip side of things,” he said, adding that the DLI scheme helped change the environment.

Commenting on the investment, Piper Serica founder and fund manager Abhay Agarwal said India’s semiconductor market could cross $100 billion by 2030, and that companies with strong chip design capabilities would create long-term value.

The post Sensesemi Bags ₹25 Cr Seed Funding to Build Edge AI Chips appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

DOE Seeks Input on Advancing AI for Science and Engineering Workforce Development and Genesis Mission Challenges

Jan. 20, 2026 –The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a Request for Information (RFI)…

San Francisco-based AI startup Emergent has secured $70 million in Series B funding from Khosla Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, along with contributions from Prosus, Lightspeed, Together, and Y Combinator.

Since its launch seven months ago, Emergent has raised $100 million in funding. The company has over 5 million users across more than 190 nations, Emergent said in a statement.

It will use the funding to support ongoing team growth, enhance product development, and facilitate entry into new markets as demand for AI-driven software development rises among entrepreneurs and small businesses worldwide.

“Software creation is undergoing a structural shift,” Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO of Emergent, said in a statement. “It used to be that only people with technical training or capital got to turn ideas into real products. Emergent flips that model. We are seeing millions of people build and ship real businesses, workflows, and products in days.”

Since its establishment, Emergent has achieved $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and the company projects to exceed $100 million in ARR by April 2026.

“Emergent is harnessing AI to unlock a massive wave of entrepreneurship by removing the technical and capital barriers that have historically limited who can build software,” said Sarthak Misra, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

Emergent has secured Series B funding three months after completing its Series A round. This new funding round follows support from Google and marks SoftBank’s return to investing in AI companies in India.

The startup provides a complete development team that quickly designs, builds, tests, and scales reliable software at a lower cost. Entrepreneurs can transform ideas into revenue in hours with production-quality software ready for launch and integrated with billing providers like Stripe.

The post San Francisco AI Startup Emergent Secures $70 Mn Series B Funding to Grow Its Team appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

VDURA Introduces Flash Volatility Index and Storage Economics Optimizer Tool

MILPITAS, Calif., Jan. 20, 2026 — VDURA today announced the release of the Flash Volatility Index and Storage…

On December 30, last year, the Gujarat government approved something India has been debating for more than a decade, but never quite managed to build: a serious national AI research institution. The Indian AI Research Organisation (IAIRO) began operations on January 1 as a Section 8 non-profit inside the GIFT City in Gandhinagar.

Despite the low-key launch, the intent is anything but small.

IAIRO is being set up as a public-private partnership between the state government, the Indian government through the IndiaAI Mission, and the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA).

For the first five years, IAIRO will operate on a budget of roughly ₹300 crore, split equally between the state, the Centre, and the private partner. IPA alone is putting in ₹25 crore in the first year. The pharma group includes companies like Cipla, Torrent and Sun Pharma.

This is not a startup incubator. It is not a skills programme.

IAIRO is being positioned as a national research institution for AI, closer in spirit to ISRO than to anything India has tried in software before.

The official note describes it as a multidisciplinary AI hub that will conduct research, build products, generate IP, train people, and work with industry and startups. It will run on a hybrid compute model, using its own GPUs along with India AI Cloud.

Not Just About LLMs

On paper, it could sound like another government AI centre. What makes it different is who is behind it and what they are trying to fix.

Amit Sheth, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina, who is leading IAIRO, has spent decades in AI research in the US. He said the idea did not start in Gandhinagar. It started two years ago in Delhi, in a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Sheth had taken the proposal for Ekagrid University that was being coordinated by Shail Kumar and involved some of the top AI leaders of Indian origin, for developing a world-class research university with an AI-first strategy. That plan did not go through. And the problem did not go away.

India produces a large number of AI users and service engineers. It does not produce frontier AI researchers or people who can build deep systems at scale.

Sheth is blunt about the gap.

“Jensen Huang has pointed out that nine of the world’s top 10 AI institutions are in China, over 70% of papers at leading AI conferences now come from China, and that supports ecosystems with deep research capability capable of producing organisations like DeepSeek. India currently lacks this depth. IAIRO exists to deliberately build it,” he said.

That sentence captures what IAIRO is really about. This is not about chatbots or coding tools. It is about whether India has the kind of research base that can create the next DeepSeek—not just use it.

An ISRO Moment for AI

From those early discussions, a position paper titled Sovereign AI for India’s Strategic Autonomy made its way to key decision-makers, including S Krishnan, secretary at MeitY; Abhishek Singh, CEO of IndiaAI; and Abhay Karandikar, secretary at the science and technology department. What followed were three goals that now define IAIRO.

The first is talent. Not broad skilling, but building a deep pool of AI researchers, scientists, and system builders capable of genuine frontier work.

The second is original IP: foundation models, applied platforms, and domain AI systems that can become Indian-origin global products.

The third is what Sheth calls a prototype-to-product ecosystem—turning papers into companies.

That is why IAIRO is being set up as a national platform rather than a single lab. Sheth describes a growing network that already includes senior researchers with h-index between 70 and 120, technical leaders from Google, Apple, DeepMind, OpenAI, IBM Research and Amazon, a reverse brain-drain cohort of Indian researchers returning or working part-time from abroad, founders who have built IP-driven companies, and investors across stages.

Layered on top of that is a formal programme called From Breakthrough to Breakout, bringing together entrepreneurs-in-residence, applied labs, and venture creation tracks.

Along with Sheth, IAIRO was founded by prof Ramesh Jain, the founding director of UC Irvine’s Institute for Future Health; prof Dev Niyogi, UNESCO Chair for AI, water and cities at the University of Texas at Austin; prof Sanjay Chaudhary from Ahmedabad University; investor and entrepreneur Juhi Bhatnagar; and Selvam Velmurugan, senior technical advisor at BlinkRx.

The board includes Ajai Chowdhry, co-founder of HCL; Sharad Sharma, founder of iSPIRT Foundation; IndiaAI’s Singh; and P Bharathi, secretary of the science and technology department.

“The ambition is not incremental improvement. It is to create, for AI, what ISRO created for space: a concentrated national capability that compounds talent, IP, and execution over decades,” Sheth said.

A Different Model Than the US & China

The first real test of that ambition will come in the sectors IAIRO has chosen to start with.

Unlike big labs in the US that chase general-purpose models, IAIRO is deliberately starting with enterprise and mission-critical AI. The logic is simple: India cannot afford to burn billions training broad LLMs that do not solve local problems.

“From day one, we are building AI systems that can power discovery, decision making, and operations inside strategic sectors,” Sheth said.

The flagship domain is pharma, which is exactly why the IPA is the anchor partner. Indian pharma already spends more on R&D than any other domestic industry, but it remains largely stuck in generics. IAIRO is bringing in people who have built AI systems for drug discovery, clinical trials, and intelligent manufacturing in the West.

“This programme spans the full stack: from AI-enabled discovery platforms, to clinical trial intelligence, to manufacturing optimisation and quality systems,” he said.

The second pillar is sustainability, and what Sheth calls ‘Digital Earth’. This is about climate, weather, agriculture, energy, and resilience.

India’s economy is intensely weather-sensitive. Floods, fog, heatwaves, and shifting rain patterns directly hit infrastructure, crops, and supply chains. IAIRO wants to build AI systems that can deliver hyperlocal prediction, digital twins of cities and ecosystems, and decision tools that governments and companies can actually use.

“Future proofing infrastructure and investment risks to weather and climatic extremes is possible with AI-based novel weather and environmental predictive tools,” Sheth said.

The third pillar is health. The idea here is not just hospital AI, but continuous, everyday health, starting with crises like diabetes.

“IAIRO is reinventing healthcare, replacing episodic care with continuous, everyday health support that helps people understand what is happening, adapt gradually over time, and engage with medical care more effectively,” he said.

Behind all of this sits IndiaAI. IAIRO is being created as a Focused Research Organisation under the IndiaAI Mission, again using a PPP model. The compute, policy backing, and national coordination will come from there.

“We consider ourselves lucky that the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance stepped in as an inaugural private partner,” Sheth said, noting how reluctant Indian corporates usually are to fund real research.

Working From -1 to 0

One of the most misunderstood parts of IAIRO is its startup plan. It is not an incubator like the ones at IITs. It does not write early cheques to every idea.

IAIRO is designed to work at what Sheth calls ‘-1 to 0’. The emphasis starts with ideas that are nationally relevant—essentially solving sovereign problems—and only then moves to the technical depth of the solution.

This happens before a company even exists. Founders are selected first. Problems are discovered and validated. IP is created inside IAIRO. Only then are companies spun out, with deep technical and ecosystem backing already in place.

“We operate at −1 to 0, not 0 to 1,” he said. “We focus on creating a small number of deeply technical, AI- and IP-led companies rather than supporting large volumes of early startups.”

There will also be a second funnel for existing startups that need serious technical reinforcement to reach a breakthrough level.

IAIRO will not usually fund TRL 1 to 3 startups with equity cheques. Instead, it absorbs the risk by paying for research, people, infrastructure and validation until the science is real enough for venture capital.

It is a very different model from most Indian programmes that hand out grants and hope for the best.

So, is IAIRO the DeepMind of India?

Sheth says no—not in the near term, at least.

“DeepMind operates at a completely different financial scale. While we have high ambitions, the current level of investment in IAIRO is far more modest, multiple orders of magnitude lower than Big Tech, and nowhere close to even relatively new players like DeepSeek,” he said.

That is why the focus is on mission-critical enterprise AI rather than generic models. It is also why the goal is to start reversing the brain drain over a long cycle, not overnight.

Creating World Class Talent

Another important reality is that India is significantly behind and has real distance to cover. China began its Thousand Talents program nearly 15 years ago, and today an estimated 80-90% of Chinese students and experts trained in the US have returned to build in China.

IAIRO is an early step towards creating a similar momentum for India—providing a serious institutional pull to start reversing the flow, with the clear understanding that this is long-cycle work. Better late than never.

Why does India publish so little cutting-edge AI research? Sheth argues it is not a talent problem. It is an ecosystem problem.

“Breakthrough research comes from institutions, not individuals,” he said. “We did our undergraduate education in India, but our serious research training, PhDs, and early high-impact work happened in the US. Not because Indians are better there, but because the ecosystem there makes excellence far more likely.”

Over the last few years, Sheth’s group in the US has published 40-60 papers annually. “More than half had Indian students working as interns with my team as co-authors. Many of them went on to do a PhD with me or join other top, fully funded PhD programmes,” he said.

IAIRO is trying to recreate that loop inside India with funded labs, strong mentors, ambitious peers, and a culture of publishing and building.

The government partnership is what makes this possible. It also creates risk.

“The risk is bureaucracy. The upside is nation-scale capability,” Sheth said.

Private capital and most Indian corporates simply are not wired to bankroll research that takes a long time to pay off. That kind of long-horizon ambition has always belonged to the state. But IAIRO is trying to keep things sharp, running as a hybrid with a third of its funding coming from private sources.

What Makes Sheth Think It Will Work?

Sheth believes this model can actually hold, as the foundation is already being laid with unusual seriousness.

“IAIRO has already attracted exceptional expertise across every role required to build a world-class AI research and deep-tech ecosystem,” he said, pointing to senior researchers with global publication records, engineers who’ve worked inside the biggest AI labs, experienced programme leaders, and an embedded investment network designed to move ideas from labs to real deployments.

On paper, the Gujarat government may have announced IAIRO as another PPP in GIFT City. In reality, however, what is actually taking shape is something far more ambitious. It is a bet that India can finally build a home for serious AI, where frontier research, real-world product building, and national missions don’t live in silos but under one roof.

Whether ₹300 crore is enough to pull that off is still up for debate. But what stands out is the intent. For the first time in a long time, India’s ambition is not modest.

The post Inside IAIRO, India’s ISRO for AI appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Google’s AI platform Gemini has entered the Indian Premier League (IPL) as a sponsor through a three-year agreement estimated at around ₹270 crore, The Economic Times reported.

The deal reflects the growing presence of AI companies in Indian cricket sponsorships. While the exact terms of the agreement are not public, the deal is expected to give Gemini branding visibility across IPL properties, including pitch-side hoardings and media backdrops.

The partnership follows ChatGPT’s entry into cricket advertising late last year, when it became a sponsor of the Women’s Premier League under a two-year deal valued at about ₹16 crore.

Following India’s recent women’s cricket World Cup victory, interest in women’s matches has surged, making them increasingly attractive for brands looking to tap into a fast-growing and more engaged audience. Notably, Gemini also served as the global partner for the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2025.

Industry executives say AI-driven brands are increasingly competing with established companies for high-profile cricket sponsorships.

In 2024, design platform Canva bid ₹554 crore for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) shirt sponsorship but lost to Apollo Tyres, which secured the rights for the 2025-2028 cycle at ₹579 crore.

According to the ET report, more partnerships between AI platforms and cricket properties are expected, with such companies likely to spend more than ₹300 crore on sponsorships alone, excluding television and digital advertising.

The TATA IPL 2025 reached a combined viewership of around one billion across television and digital platforms during the season, marking one of the biggest audiences in IPL history. Some reports put the combined reach even higher at about 1.19 billion viewers over the full season.

AI platforms could play a role similar to that of fantasy sports in sustaining interest in sports advertising. Cricket’s appeal as an advertising platform has only intensified as other high-spending categories have pulled back.

The government’s ban on real-money gaming and fantasy sports removed an estimated ₹7,000 crore in advertising spend from the market, particularly affecting television and digital sports advertising.

With India seen as a key growth market, AI platforms are increasingly turning to cricket to reach large audiences and drive user adoption.

The post Google’s Gemini Signs IPL Sponsorship Deal Worth ₹270 Crore appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.