Chinese AI startup MiniMax has launched H3, a video-generation model it says costs about 70% less than rivals such as ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 and Kuaishou's Kling 3.0. H3 can generate 15-second 2K videos with native stereo sound, and supports video editing using multimodal prompts. MiniMax plans to release H3's model weights, allowing developers to download, modify and customise the model.

Innov8 Coworking Founder Ritesh Malik has purchased a 5,175-square-foot bungalow in Delhi's Golf Links for ₹85 crore. Malik reportedly plans to demolish the existing structure, which is in a dilapidated condition, and redevelop the site into a 6,000- to 7,000-square-foot residence. Innov8 was acquired by OYO for around ₹220 crore in 2019.

Zepto has paused its IPO plans and is instead looking to raise over ₹1,000 crore through a pre-IPO funding round, Moneycontrol reported. Existing investors, including Glade Brook, General Catalyst, Goodwater Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, are expected to participate. The IPO was delayed after major domestic mutual funds valued the company well below its earlier expectations.

AI startup LemonLime Co-Founder Jordan Zietz is facing backlash over his post, which has been deleted, about offering job interviews to people who get LemonLime tattoos at a Y Combinator afterparty. "Seven people left our...afterparty with permanent tattoos," he said. "This might not be illegal, but it...should be," one X user said, while another said, "This is really not funny."

AI startup Sarvam on Thursday launched 'Epoch Builder Edition', a developer and enterprise platform to build, fine-tune, deploy India-centric AI models. The platform features 7-billion and 70-billion parameter multilingual LLMs supporting over 10 Indian languages. It provides GPU clusters and curated datasets on Indian law, finance and governance, aiming to reduce reliance on foreign AI models.

Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam has roped in Devendra Singh Chaplot as a part-time advisor from Elon Musk's xAI. Before joining xAI in March this year, Chaplot was also a part of the founding teams of AI startup Mistral and former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. This comes after Sarvam opened a new office in San Francisco.

AI startup Sarvam on Thursday announced that it is building a one trillion-plus parameter foundational model in India. The new model is aimed at competing in agentic coding, cybersecurity, scientific research, and simulation workloads, Sarvam's co-Founder Pratyush Kumar said at an event. The startup also unveiled a pricing strategy that it claimed was 5.5 times cheaper than leading global models.

Microsoft reported a $3.2 billion gain from its investment in AI firm Anthropic in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026. Microsoft had invested $5 billion in Anthropic in November 2025 in a deal where the AI firm agreed to purchase Azure services worth $30 billion. Microsoft marked down its investments in OpenAI about $600 million in the fourth quarter.

OpenAI has launched a new Academic Researchers programme to provide 1 lakh selected researchers free access to its frontier AI models. The programme will begin with 10,000 researchers before extending to 1 lakh researchers by 2027, OpenAI said. Each researcher will get access to OpenAI's advanced models at launch, including GPT-5.6 Sol Pro, and can bring up to four collaborators.

Hair beauty and styling startup Truth & Hair has raised ₹5.4 crore in a seed funding round led by Inflection Point Ventures. The Gurugram-based company will use the capital for product development, marketing, brand expansion and distribution growth. Founded in 2024, the startup focuses on hair makeup and styling products. It was also featured on Shark Tank India Season 5.