Helsinki-headquartered Aiven, which runs managed open-source data services such as Apache Kafka and PostgreSQL across major clouds, has launched India operations with a Bengaluru office. It plans to grow its 15-person local team as paying customers in Asia-Pacific rise nearly 90% a year.
Chevron ENGINE and IIT Madras have launched the Chevron-IITM Energy Technology Incubation Program, offering early-stage innovators, researchers and social entrepreneurs mentorship, prototype funding and incubation support in energy technology, carbon utilisation, circular economy and resource efficiency.
Digital lender mPokket has onboarded more than 6.5 million new-to-credit customers, most of them under 25 and from rural and semi-urban India. The company expects lifetime disbursals to exceed $5.5 billion in FY26 and is targeting a loan book above ₹20,000 crore within three years.
IIT Madras-incubated spacetech start-up GalaxEye has secured ₹63.84 crore through the Technology Development Board under India's ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund to develop a next-generation OptoSAR satellite that can image the Earth through clouds and darkness.
Dextr AI, which builds AI agents that answer calls, take reservations and manage guest requests for hotels, has raised $6.7 million in a seed round led by Elevation Capital with Foundation Capital participating. The company has named India as an expansion market.
Meta rose 4.5% to $777.45 and Alphabet gained 1.3% on September 24 even as bond yields hit 2007 highs, as investors cheered Meta's Muse AI assistant and new Ray-Ban glasses, extending Meta's rally this week to about 16%.
Palo Alto-based PicoJool has raised a $27.5 million Series A led by Socratic Partners, with Hudson River Trading participating, to scale its VCSEL-based optical interconnects that move data between chips in AI clusters.
New York-based HIFI has raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital to scale infrastructure that connects bank rails, stablecoins and tokenised assets, after processing more than $7 billion in annualised volume across 87 countries.
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the Blue Owl-backed developer of Project Jupiter, a 2.45-gigawatt Stargate data centre for OpenAI, seeking the right to delay payments if the site misses its 2028 start. Oracle shares fell about 4%.
US semiconductor company Mythic AI has launched a Bengaluru Centre of Excellence to build its analog compute-in-memory AI chips, targeting data centres, cars and robotics, and plans to quadruple its India workforce by early 2027.