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
Thermocool rolls out Navratri campaign on trains and stations
Nine day digital push blends devotion and storytelling for travellers
NEW DELHI: Thermocool Home Appliances has launched a high-visibility digital campaign during Navratri, turning railway stations and trains into storytelling spaces that blend culture with brand engagement.
The nine-day campaign spans key high-footfall locations including Katra, Anand Vihar, Gorakhpur, Prayagraj and Moradabad, along with the Vande Bharat Express on the Delhi-Katra route. Travellers encounter the campaign across station screens, concourses and onboard infotainment systems, making it hard to miss.
What sets the initiative apart is its narrative approach. Each day of Navratri is dedicated to one of the nine forms of Goddess Durga, with digital content explaining the significance and stories behind each day. The result is a campaign that does more than advertise, it informs and engages passengers in the middle of their journeys.
For director of sales and marketing Tanuj Gupta, the idea was to go beyond visibility. He noted that while Navratri is widely celebrated, awareness of its deeper meaning is often limited, and the campaign aims to bridge that gap in a simple and accessible way.
By tapping into high-traffic transit spaces, Thermocool is placing its message where audiences naturally gather, from busy platforms to train compartments. The repeated exposure across these touchpoints is designed to build familiarity while creating a more meaningful connection with consumers.
In a season marked by devotion and festivity, the campaign finds a clever middle ground. It turns everyday travel into a cultural moment, where storytelling travels alongside the passenger.
