Brands
Mobile Premier League and Indian Cricket Captain Virat Kohli renew association
Bangalore: India’s biggest mobile gaming and skill monetisation platform Mobile Premier League (MPL) and Indian Cricket Captain Virat Kohli have renewed their association for another year. Kohli will continue to represent and endorse the brand across channels.
MPL had first teamed up with Kohli early in 2019, releasing video campaigns with the charismatic cricketer ahead of and during the Indian Premier League (IPL). Since then, MPL has garnered a registered user base of 32 million and over 5 billion gameplays have been clocked on the platform. Recently, MPL also released a digital video campaign that went viral, where Kohli met and interacted with the top users of the MPL platform for a day in Mumbai.
With its focus on skill-based gaming and exhaustive cricket game collection across formats like Fantasy, Predictions, virtual games of skill, MPL is glad to continue to have Kohli on board as the Cricketer personifies skill, hard work, and youthful determination.
“I am happy to announce that I have renewed my association with Mobile Premier League (MPL). In just over a year, I have seen this young Indian startup grow and reach fans across India. I look forward to supporting them in achieving their goal of being the number one gaming company in India," said Virat Kohli, Captain of the Indian Cricket team. Jogesh Lulla, COO, Cornerstone Sports, which manages Mr. Kohli added “MPL is a young company with exceptional leadership and are on track to become the largest e-sports platform. Our partnership thus far has been fantastic and we look forward to helping them grow from strength to strength along with Virat."
“We are honored and privileged to have Virat continue his association with the MPL family. With his love and support, we have started to march towards our goal of democratising esports and skill monetisation across India. Virat, his persona, and his positivity resonates across our youth, and along with him, we are looking forward to doing our bit to empower the immensely large talent pool in our country,” said Sai Srinivas, Co-Founder and CEO, MPL.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
