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
Bajaj Consumer Care FY26 profit rises to Rs 193.7 crore
Revenue climbs to Rs 1,092 crore as profit grows 49 per cent YoY
MUMBAI: Hair today, growth tomorrow Bajaj Consumer Care Limited seems to have found its shine again, posting a sharp jump in profitability even as it doubled down on brand spends and expansion. The company reported a net profit of Rs 193.7 crore for FY26, marking a strong 49 per cent rise from Rs 130.1 crore in FY25. Revenue from operations also grew to Rs 1,092.2 crore, up from Rs 942.8 crore a year earlier, signalling steady demand momentum across its portfolio.
For the March quarter, profit stood at Rs 64.1 crore, compared to Rs 31.5 crore in the corresponding period last year, while revenue rose to Rs 308.3 crore from Rs 243.5 crore.
The performance came despite a notable increase in spending. Advertising and sales promotion expenses climbed to Rs 168.3 crore in FY26, up from Rs 137.8 crore in FY25, reflecting continued investment in brand building. Other expenses also rose to Rs 151.3 crore from Rs 134.2 crore, indicating a broader push towards growth.
Operating efficiency, however, held firm. Profit before tax increased to Rs 234.8 crore in FY26 from Rs 157.7 crore a year earlier, supported by disciplined cost management across materials and inventory.
On the balance sheet, the company’s total assets expanded to Rs 959.1 crore as of March 31, 2026, compared to Rs 931.9 crore a year earlier. Other equity rose to Rs 780.3 crore, reinforcing a stronger financial base.
Cash flow from operations saw a significant uptick, reaching Rs 196.9 crore in FY26, nearly three times the Rs 67.9 crore recorded in FY25, highlighting improved working capital management.
However, the year also saw aggressive capital allocation. The company spent Rs 190.2 crore on share buybacks, contributing to a net cash outflow of Rs 196.5 crore from financing activities. Cash and cash equivalents stood at Rs 6.8 crore at the end of the year, down from Rs 25.6 crore.
Even as investments in subsidiaries and assets continued, the numbers suggest a company balancing growth ambitions with shareholder returns keeping one eye on expansion and the other on efficiency.
With margins improving and revenue steadily climbing, Bajaj Consumer Care appears to be combing through the competition with renewed confidence.
