Brands
Luma AI raises $900m as Saudi supercluster powers its world-model push
MUMBAI: If AI is the new space race, Luma AI just strapped itself to a rocket. The frontier multimodal intelligence company has announced a $900 million Series C, one of the largest AI raises of the year, led by HUMAIN, the PIF-backed full-stack AI powerhouse alongside AMD Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners. The announcement, made in Washington, D.C. during the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum, signals a dramatic leap forward in the race to build AI that doesn’t just reason or respond, but understands and operates within the physical world.
At the heart of this partnership lies Project Halo, HUMAIN’s upcoming 2-gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most ambitious compute infrastructure buildouts. Luma AI will become a flagship customer, tapping into Halo’s colossal computational muscle to train its next-generation “world models”, capable of learning from video, image, audio, and language at unprecedented scale.
Luma AI CEO and co-founder Amit Jain framed the moment with characteristic audacity, “To create AI that can help humanity in the physical world… we need systems that can learn from a quadrillion tokens, the digital memory of humanity itself.”
Jain emphasised HUMAIN’s speed of deployment and end-to-end approach as key to achieving the company’s ambitious multimodal roadmap, with the partnership spanning custom models, go-to-market collaboration and frontier-grade deployment.
For HUMAIN, the partnership is as philosophical as it is infrastructural. “We’re not just funding the next wave of AI, we’re building the full value chain that makes it possible,” said CEO Tareq Amin, calling Luma “an exceptional frontier startup” whose research velocity and real-world product chops align with HUMAIN’s global ambitions.
The supercluster will enable training on peta-scale multimodal datasets 1,000 to 10,000 times larger than those used in today’s frontier LLMs. Alongside this, next-generation inference systems will deliver real-time global deployment, an ecosystem designed to simulate, understand, and eventually operate in the physical world.
Luma’s capabilities aren’t theoretical. Its flagship model, Ray3, has already become quietly ubiquitous used by studios, ad agencies, and integrated into Adobe’s global products. The new funding will accelerate Luma’s expansion from entertainment and advertising into high-impact domains such as simulation, robotics, design, and industrial automation.
Luma AI was also the first suite of models to launch under HUMAIN Create, a programme building sovereign AI models for the Arabic-speaking world systems attuned to cultural nuance, linguistic diversity, and regional identity. The new raise gives this initiative significant tailwind as sovereign AI becomes a strategic priority across the Middle East.
With $900 million in fresh fuel, a 2GW supercluster in sight, and a roadmap that aims to learn from humanity’s cumulative digital footprint, Luma AI is positioning itself squarely in the AGI vanguard. The company’s next chapter promises a shift from “generative AI” to reality-scale intelligence models that don’t just create images or text, but simulate the world itself.
In the race to build AI that sees, hears, moves, reasons and interacts like a human, Luma just hit fast-forward.
Brands
Faber-Castell India appoints Sunaina Haldar as director – marketing
With stints at Tata, SleepyCat and ADF Foods under her belt, Haldar is primed to redraw Faber-Castell’s brand story
MUMBAI: Faber-Castell India has poached Sunaina Haldar from ADF Foods, appointing her director – marketing as the German stationery brand looks to muscle up in a category that is rapidly reinventing itself around creativity and self-expression.
Haldar hit the ground running. “My first couple of weeks have been incredibly energising, understanding consumers, visiting markets, engaging with retailers and immersing myself into the world of Faber-Castell Group,” she said.
She arrives with considerable firepower. At ADF Foods, Haldar ran marketing across India and international markets for a portfolio spanning Ashoka, Aeroplane, Camel and ADF Soul. Before that, she was vice-president – marketing at direct-to-consumer mattress brand SleepyCat, where she helmed brand, content and performance marketing. Her résumé also includes a stint leading marketing, new product development and CRM for Tata SmartFoodz at Tata Consumer Products, no small proving ground.
Between corporate roles, Haldar also operated as a fractional CMO for early-stage startups, building marketing strategy and operational structures from scratch, a signal that she knows how to move fast with limited resources.
With 18 years straddling FMCG, D2C and the startup world, Haldar now takes the reins at a brand that has long owned the classroom but is clearly hungry for the living room. In a stationery market where the pencil has become a lifestyle statement, Faber-Castell has picked someone who knows exactly how to sell that story.
