Brands
Luma powers up with massive 900m dollar raise
MUMBAI: Reality just got a serious upgrade. Luma AI has flicked the switch on one of the year’s biggest tech fundraises, securing 900 million dollars in Series C financing and plugging itself into a colossal new compute partnership that could reshape how artificial intelligence learns, reasons and interacts with the physical world.
The round is led by Humain, a PIF company building full stack AI systems, with additional backing from AMD Ventures and returning investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners. The new capital and access to frontier level compute put Luma on a faster track towards multimodal AGI, a form of intelligence designed to generate, understand and operate across video, image, audio and language.
At the heart of the partnership is Project Halo, a planned 2 gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia that will become one of the world’s largest compute infrastructure builds. Luma will become an anchor customer as the companies jointly push forward the next generation of world models, AI systems trained on peta scale multimodal data that far exceed the breadth and depth of today’s leading language models.
Speaking on the announcement, Luma AI CEO and co founder Amit Jain said, Humain brings the scale, speed and ambition needed to train systems on a quadrillion tokens of information drawn from humanity’s digital footprint. He noted that the expanded collaboration covers customised models, go to market efforts and deployment pipelines to build an end to end value chain for multimodal intelligence.
Humain CEO Tareq Amin said, the investment reflects the company’s strategy of funding and building the AI value chain simultaneously. He described Luma as a frontier startup whose research velocity and ability to ship real products align with Humain’s vision for global scale AI capabilities powered by the upcoming 2 gigawatt cluster.
Luma’s flagship model, Ray3, is already used across studios, brands and agencies worldwide and is integrated into Adobe’s products. With fresh investment and compute capacity, the company plans to expand from entertainment and advertising into simulation, design and robotics.
The partnership also extends to Humain Create, an initiative to develop sovereign AI models trained on Arabic and regional data. These models aim to bring cultural nuance, linguistic depth and visual context to governments, enterprises and creators across the Middle East and North Africa.
For an industry racing to simulate the real world, this funding is more than just fuel. It is a signal that the next era of AI will be shaped not only by clever algorithms but by oceans of data and superclusters built to power intelligence at planetary scale.
Brands
Dabur buys minority stake in Ras Beauty for Rs 60 crore
Dabur Ventures deal backs fast-growing luxury skincare brand
MUMBAI: Dabur India Limited has dipped into the world of luxury skincare, signing a definitive agreement to acquire a minority stake in Ras Beauty Private Limited for Rs 60 crore. The investment marks the first bet from Dabur Ventures, the FMCG major’s Rs 500 crore platform set up in October 2025 to back high-potential, new-age direct-to-consumer brands.
Founded in Raipur by Shubhika Jain, her sister Suramya Jain and their mother Sangeeta Jain, Ras Beauty has grown from a family-led passion project into a fast-scaling “Farm-to-Face” skincare label. Its range of face elixirs, serums and moisturisers blends essential oils with nature-derived actives, striking a balance between botanical purity and laboratory precision.
The numbers tell their own story. Ras has clocked a three-year Cagr of around 75 per cent and an annual run rate of approximately Rs 100 crore, all while maintaining strong gross margins. That growth has been fuelled by a digital-first approach, in-house R&D and manufacturing, and a sharp focus on clean, sustainable sourcing.
Dabur India executive director and group head corporate strategy Abhinav Dhall, said the company was drawn to Ras’s distinct positioning at the intersection of nature, science and luxury. He added that the premium beauty segment is poised for robust expansion over the coming decade, and that Ras is well placed to capture that opportunity.
For Ras, the partnership is as much about scale as it is about shared philosophy. Co-founder and CEO Shubhika Jain said Dabur’s 141-year legacy of building trusted, purpose-led brands makes it a natural ally. The capital infusion, she noted, will help accelerate the brand’s omnichannel footprint, deepen research capabilities and invest in team and brand building, with an eye on establishing Ras as a leading Indian luxury skincare name both domestically and overseas.
With this move, Dabur is not just investing in a skincare label. It is placing an early wager on India’s growing appetite for premium, conscious beauty, and signalling that heritage FMCG players are ready to play in the new-age D2C arena.
