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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
upGrad acquires Internshala in 90 per cent stock deal to own career funnel
Deal aims to scale Internshala’s revenue from Rs 45 crore to Rs 100 crore
MUMBAI: upGrad has acquired Internshala, the world’s largest internship and early-talent marketplace, in a bid to stitch education, skilling and employment into a single career pipeline.
The transaction, announced on 26 February, is structured as a 90 per cent stock-swap, with the financial terms undisclosed. The deal deepens upGrad’s push to control the full career lifecycle, from learning to hiring, at a time when India’s skilling economy is under pressure to deliver outcomes, not just credentials.
Founded in 2010, Internshala claims more than 34 million registered users and 450,000 employers, with roughly 3 million active applicants each year. Over 40 per cent of its users come from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, and most of the platform’s traffic is organic. The company currently reports an annual revenue base of Rs 45 crore.
Under upGrad’s ownership, Internshala is expected to scale aggressively. The company aims to grow the platform’s revenue to Rs 100 crore and beyond, backed by increased investment in product development, AI-led talent matching and enterprise hiring solutions.
Internshala will continue to operate as an independent brand, led by its founder and CEO Sarvesh Agrawal, while tapping into upGrad’s technology stack, distribution and learning ecosystem.
“Education and employment in India have operated in silos for too long,” said upGrad head of corporate strategy and growth Chirag Samdaria. He said the acquisition strengthens the earliest and most consequential stage of the career journey, where intent is high and outcomes can be shaped.
Agrawal described the deal as a natural convergence of learning and opportunity, adding that the partnership would allow Internshala to skill millions of candidates and supply pre-trained talent to employers at scale.
Investec acted as exclusive financial adviser to Internshala.
The acquisition marks a strategic milestone for upGrad as it seeks to position itself not merely as an education provider, but as an end-to-end workforce development platform aligned with India’s evolving labour market.
