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The Bengaluru team will support firms including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Goldman Sachs and others—both their global and Indian establishments.
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Sarvam says the updated model delivers stronger table extraction, form field recognition, and handwritten text processing, while reducing hallucinations and inference costs.
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Lightspeed is sharpening its India strategy around AI, targeting $250 million for a new early-stage fund as the venture firm bets the technology will drive the next wave of startups in one of the world’s largest markets. The Silicon Valley venture firm is already a major investor in AI companies includingAnthropic,xAI, andDatabricks. In India, it has backedSarvam AI, one of the country’s leading large language model developers and a startup selected by the Indian government to help develop sovereign AI models. The new fund, Lightspeed India Partners V, will be half the size of its$500 million predecessor, which was raised in 2022 and has already committed 80% of its capital to startups, according to a letter sent to investors on Thursday and seen by TechCrunch. In late April, Lightspeeddisclosedthe new fund in a U.S. regulatory filing, though the filing did not specify its target size. Indian media had previouslyreportedthat the firm was looking to raise between $300 million and $350 million for the vehicle. Lightspeed plans to begin investing from the new fund within two months and has designed it around an investment period of roughly two and a half years, per the letter. Until then, it will continue making its final investments from the existing fund. A Lightspeed spokesperson declined to comment. Starting with the new fund, Lightspeed is also moving its India funds onto the same fundraising cycle as its global funds for the first time, per the investor letter. The change brings a regional business it established nearly two decades ago more closely in line with the rest of the firm. The move follows a similar shift by rival firm Accel, which in Augustraised its latest $550 million India fundalongside new U.S. and Europe funds and a global growth vehicle as part of a coordinated $3.5 billion fundraising effort. It was the first time Accel had raised all four funds simultaneously. The $250 million fund is sized to match how quickly Lightspeed is currently investing and its shorter investment period, according to the letter. Lightspeed suggested to investors that the smaller size lets it focus on individual deals rather than fund size, and raise its next fund sooner. The new fund also marks a sharper focus on AI for Lightspeed’s early-stage investment strategy in the region. The investment thesis outlined in the letter anticipates AI creating more value in India than the internet did, with the fund seeking out AI companies across India and Southeast Asia. India has yet to produce a major frontier AI model developer on the global stage and hasattracted far less investmentin AI than the U.S. and China. Investors, nonetheless, increasingly see an opportunity for India in the application layer, drawing on the country’s large pool of software developers and its decades-long history as a hub for software and technology services. The new $250 million India vehicle is a fraction of the capital available across Lightspeed’s global platform. The firm, which manages more than $65 billion in assets globally,raised $9 billionacross several new funds last December, the largest fundraising haul in its history. The totalincluded a $980 millionearly-stage venture fund. Lightspeed’s dedicated India and Southeast Asia funds represent only part of the capital the firm has put to work in the region. Those funds have deployed roughly $900 million, while Lightspeed’s global funds have invested another $1.6 billion to support companies from the regional portfolio, according to the investor letter. The decision to dedicate its newest regional fund entirely to AI also marks a sharper thematic focus for Lightspeed in a market where it has historically invested across sectors. Its India portfolio spans businesses including quick commerce, consumer internet, software, and household services. Lightspeed’s bets in India have included companies such as quick-commerce startupZepto, audio platformPocket FM, house-help startupSnabbit, rooftop solar startupSolarSquare, and a range of enterprise software businesses. The same team that led Lightspeed’s previous four India funds will manage the new fund, per the letter.
Is Meta’sjust-announced Muse Charma playful device that will make AI more approachable to everyday consumers, or will it be yet another flop in a long list of AI hardware gadgets that didn’t take off, like the Ai Pin, Rabbit, or Friend pendant? Reactions, so far, have been mixed. What the Charm is, however, is on-trend. Like it or not, the form factor could potentially appeal to Gen Z consumers who, in this post-Labubuera, have already been into various dangling items from keychains and bags. It’s all part of a broader kitschy, retro-inspired shift in their approach to fashion and technology. Already, Gen Z has created a market for things that dangle, with everything from lip glosses to hand sanitizers to sunblocks to fragrances and more turned intobag charms, primarily targeted at women. View this post on InstagramA post shared by Kristina Rodulfo (@kristinarodulfo) A post shared by Kristina Rodulfo (@kristinarodulfo) Hailey Bieber’s viral Rhode lip case, which stuck thelip gloss onto a phone case, had a big influence on this idea that beauty products could also be fashion accessories, as did itsother beauty-focused bag charms. (The brand saw $212 million in annual net sales from a lineup of roughly 10 products,Vogue notedlast year, as the company announced its billion-dollar exit to Elf Beauty.) Then there was theLabubu craze, which saw sales of the so-ugly-it’s-cute fuzzy monster bag charm explode, growing Pop Mart’s (the Chinese retailer behind the product)revenue to $1.8 billion in 2024, a 7x jump from 2019. While demand for the Labubu itself has since faded, the concept of the decorative bag charm has not. One analyst firm estimates the global bag charm market willgrow to over $1 billion by 2030. Today, bag charms can be characters, bedazzled beauty products, or other whimsical designs or objects, like Coach’s covetedcherry charms, aGen Z favorite. They’ve proven popular because they’re a means of expressing your personality, just as humans have done for ages through their fashion choices, makeup, and jewelry. Similarly, Meta’s Muse is a customizable character; you design your own avatar, which makes the AI agent a reflection of you, too. And, as many have pointed out, Muse Charm’s form factor recalls a Tamagotchi, the pocket-sized digital virtual pet that became a major toy fad in the late 90s and again in the mid-2000s. However, the Tamagotchi is not the most current reference. It seems the Muse Charm is actually a twist on what some young people are already doing with their Apple Watch. Often meant as a way torepurpose an older device, the concept of the Apple Watch keychain or charm has been growing in popularity, fueled by TikTok videos showing different ways to use the watch when not on your wrist. never even used it for years! About to use it everyday now 🤓#applewatch#applewatchhacks#applewatchtips#apple#lvwallet On retailers likeAmazonand Walmart, and marketplaces like eBay andEtsy, there are thousands of Apple Watch keychains, straps, pendants, lanyards, clips, and bag charm cases now available in nearly every style you can think of. As you might expect, these keychain watches are often being adopted by younger women as a fashion accessory first, rather than a piece of technology. I’m obsessed 💕#applewatch#teacher#teachersoftiktok#girly#cute This all then intersects withthe broader retro-tech trend, which has seen older tech like digital cameras, flip phones, iPods,CDs, cassette tapes,home phones, and wired earbuds making a quiet comeback. This vibe shift in tech comes as young peopledescribethe addictive, algorithm-driven feeds and “soulness” nature of technology as making them feel more disconnected, which has also fed into this trend of wanting tech they can touch and feel. (One startup, Clicks, is even bringing back the physical phone keyboard ina BlackBerry-inspired device, for instance.) For Gen Z, these physical objects help them feel more connected with the technology they’re using and offer a sense of control over a world where technology has become so deeply integrated into our lives that it no longer feels like a choice to use it. Young women, again,have been at the forefrontof this trend, with some evencraftingtheir ownportable, mini computers, “cyberdecks,” which they fit inside clamshell purses or custom cases, and bedazzle with jewels, flowers, stickers, pearls, and other items to make them feel more personal. That brings us back to the Muse Charm. While it’s clearly designed with the tech-as-fashion-accessory trend in mind, that doesn’t mean it will be a hit. Meta has abused consumer trust over the years to such an extent that it may never fully recover. To name just a few examples: The tech giant had tosettle with the FTC over charges that it deceived consumersby making users’ private information public without their consent, and has beenpenalizedby the FTC fornumerousprivacy-related violations. In 2023,the FTC charged Meta with violating a privacy orderthat was filed after the 2019 settlement. It’s also beenrepeatedlyhauledbefore Congress over its harms to minors, haslostorsettledmultiple lawsuits over the same topics, and hasseenvariouswhistleblowersouting its abuses. These careless privacy practices could ultimately see Meta lose the battle to be the consumer AI of choice… unless, of course, consumers decide that the “devil you know” is better than the one you don’t. (Especially when the latter are those warningAI could put an end to the human race.) Meta’s end game, after all, is highly-targeted, highly-personalized ads. If that’s the privacy tradeoff in gaining access to free AI — Meta said it willmonetize Muse by taking a small fee from transactions— consumers could be willing to take the risk.
Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, a Stargate data center campus in New Mexico,Bloomberg first reportedThursday. Force majeure clauses, common in energy and commodities contracts, excuse a party from contractual obligations when events outside its control get in the way. Oracle is not seeking to exit as the campus’s main tenant, according to Bloomberg’s sources. Instead, the notice would allow the company to delay payments should the facility miss its 2028 target to come online. The notice also comes as AI data center construction faces growing scrutiny nationally, and as developers take on steep costs to build capacity for customers like OpenAI. Oracle maintains that it does not expect a delay. “Project Jupiter remains on our planned schedule,” Oracle said in astatement to CNBC. “We are fully committed to New Mexico and confident in our path forward.” Blue Owl Capital, whose unit received the notice, said in its own statement to CNBC that “this notice does not change the financial commitments to this multi-year project.” Neither Oracle nor Blue Owl immediately responded to TechCrunch’s requests for comment. Still, the notice follows a string of setbacks at the site, many of them tied to its energy supply. The campus, designed to handle 2.45 gigawatts, is meant to run on gas-powered fuel cells from Bloom Energy, which makes a reliable gas supply central to its timeline. An Energy Transfer pipeline intended to deliver gas to the site has also been delayed nearly six months, to February 1, 2027, after regulators repeatedly denied permits for the line. In August,Bloomberg reportedthat the pipeline’s route had been changed following those rejections. A separate air-quality permit for the fuel cell system that would power the campus is also pending. The state’s environment department faces a November 23 deadline to decide. Project Jupiter is one of the flagship sites of Stargate, the AI infrastructure initiative Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank announced with President Donald Trump early in his second term. The campus has drawn opposition from residents and environmental groups and has become a political flashpoint ahead of the midterm elections. Oracle has responded with a public outreach campaign in the state aimed at winning over the project’s critics, according to Bloomberg.
The AI LabPrismML— founded by Caltech researchers and advised by UC Berkeley’s Ion Stoica — has created a version of its tiny language models for smart glasses running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. On Wednesday, at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, the chipmaker showcased PrismML’s 1-bit Bonsai LLM, which can be run locally on AI smart glasses built on the Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 Platform. As TechCrunch previously reported,PrismML’s claim to fameis that it shrinks larger models substantially (in this case, by 4x), while retaining almost all of their performance on standard benchmarks. The smart glasses version is a 2-billion-parameter model tuned for vision and language, so wearers can ask what they’re looking at in real time. Prism’s larger goal is open-weight AI that runs on devices and makes better use of the computing power they already have. The startup pitches this as an alternative to depending on the privacy promises of proprietary AI labs and their insatiable need for more compute. Releasing a model for Qualcomm’s chip is a step toward that vision. But no smart glasses running PrismML have been announced yet.
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We’re closing in on the last couple of weeks untilTechCrunch Disrupt 2026kicks off! To help everyone in your network gain new tech insights, discover emerging tech, and make impactful connections that move the needle, we’ve opened up a 50% discount on a second ticket across all ticket types. This BOGO offer is live until the Disrupt doors open on October 13 at 8 a.m. PT. Buy one pass toDisrupt 2026andget 50% off a second of the same ticket type. This is a short window to bring someone with you — and get more out of being there. Bring a colleague. A co-founder. A partner.This offer ends when San Francisco’s Moscone West doors open on October 13 at 8 a.m. PT.After that, prices go up, and you’ll be paying more for the same access.Lock in your 50% off a second pass savings now. Not one person can coverDisrupton their own. This conference is built to bring your co-founder, partner, colleague, or friend and share the new insights and connections that are being made From October 13-15 in San Francisco,300+ showcasing startupsand10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaderscome together for three days of200+ tactical sessionsled by250+ tech leadersacrosssix industry stages, roundtables, and breakouts. Unparalleled AI-powered matchmaking drives conversations and connections that move fast and change trajectories. When you attend with a colleague, peer, or partner, you don’t just experience more — you make better use of what you hear and who you meet. You can: It’s a simple shift, but it changes the outcome.Find your ticket match for you and your plus-one and save up to $450. Disruptbrings together 10,000 startup and VC leaders focused on what it takes to build and scale right now. Disrupt is for you if you’re: The value comes from connecting with people working through the same challenges and learning from those who’ve already done it. Explore theDisrupt events pageto see what’s planned. This buy one, get one 50% off deal applies when youpurchase two of the same ticket typeforDisruptby October 13 at 8 a.m. PT, making it easy to bring someone from your team. Buy one Investor pass andget a second one for 50% off — up to a $450 savings. Connect directly with founders, access curated networking, and spend time where deal flow happens. Bringing another investor or partner helps youcompare signals and act faster. Buy one Founder pass andget a second one for 50% off — a $425 savings. Meet investors aligned with your stage, challenge your thinking, and hear what’s working from operators. Attending with a co-founder or teammate helps youdivide and move quickly. Buy one Attendee pass andget a second one for 50% off — up to $412 savings. Built for product, engineering, growth, and go-to-market teams, this pass gives you access to stages, breakouts, and networking tooptimize your roadmap to revenue systems. Buy one Non-profit pass andget a second one for 50% off — a $237 savings. Connect with builders and investors and explore how emerging tech applies to your work. Bringing a peer helpsturn what you hear into something usable. Buy one Student pass andget a second one for 50% off — a $175 savings. Learn from founders and investors and start building your network early. Attending with a peer helps younavigate more and make stronger connections. Buy one Expo+ pass andget a second one for 50% off — a $162 savings. Go behind the scenes of disruptive startups. Use the show floor to scout talent, demo emerging tech, and land your next role at a high-growth company, while covering more ground with your plus-one. The value of this limited-time discount goes far beyond saving on a secondDisruptpass. It’s about deepening relationships and making the most of the time you’ll spend in San Francisco. It’s the difference between attending and turning conversations into deals, hires, and next steps. This offer is only here for five days.Buy one pass and get a second pass for 50% offwhile you still can. Once the offer ends, the opportunity to attend together at this price does too. Buy one pass. Get 50% off the second of the same ticket type. Decide who you’re bringing, andlock in your two passes before doors at the venue open at 8 a.m. PT on October 13.Secure your passes now forDisruptand amplify the value you get from being here. And if it’ll be just you attending,save up to $200 before prices increase tomorrow, September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Don’t miss out on any of these ticket savings and one of the most anticipated tech conferences of the year.
Spotify has integrated its streaming service with Meta's Muse personal AI agent, allowing users to control playback and manage music, podcasts and audiobooks through conversational requests. The integration extends to playlist creation, content discovery and Spotify's Personal Podcast feature. Muse can also connect listening with a user's schedule, allowing playback to be arranged around activities such as exercise or focused work. Spotify has also outlined a road-trip use case where Muse can create and schedule a playlist based on the user's destination.
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Spotify has integrated its streaming service with Meta's Muse personal AI agent, allowing users to control playback and manage music, podcasts and audiobooks through conversational requests. The integration extends to playlist creation, content discovery and Spotify's Personal Podcast feature. Muse can also connect listening with a user's schedule, allowing playback to be arranged around activities such as exercise or focused work. Spotify has also outlined a road-trip use case where Muse can create and schedule a playlist based on the user's destination.
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There are only two days left to save up to $200 on yourTechCrunch Disrupt 2026pass, and we’re on reason 4 of 5 why you should attend. While most tech events can give you plenty to think about, the useful ones also give you something to do differently when you get back to work. Before we dive into the next reason,secure your pass before these savings disappear after September 25at 11:59 p.m. PT. Bring a second guest at 50% off. Across three days at Disrupt, happening October 13-15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, some of the biggest questions facing founders, investors, and technology leaders are being turned into working conversations. How do you build defensibility when an AI platform can ship into your category? What does it actually take to land a first institutional check? How should startups compete for AI talent? How do you price AI products sustainably? When should M&A become part of your strategy? What separates a company that investors find interesting from one they are prepared to fund? These aren’t theoretical questions for the people answering them. TheBuilders Stageis built around the realities of building and scaling companies: fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, product strategy, and growth.Roundtablesgo smaller and more interactive, creating space to get into the decisions behind the headlines.Breakoutsare where you go to ask direct questions to a panel of leaders. Across thewider agenda, founders, investors, and operators are tackling questions around AI agents, enterprise adoption, fintech, infrastructure, robotics, energy, security, and the changing economics of building technology companies. The point isn’t to collect more predictions — it’s to understand how people dealing with these shifts right now are responding to them. Hear from 250+ leaderswho’ve made waves across the tech ecosystem, including founders, VCs, and operators from Anthropic, OpenAI, Rivian, Cerebras, Replit, and more, alongside featured guest Mark Wahlberg. Grab your pass now to save up to $200 before September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. If you’re raising, you can hear investors explain what moves a company from a first meeting toward a term sheet. If you’re building, you can hear how other founders are thinking about product differentiation, AI economics, hiring, distribution, and scale. If you invest, you can see how operators are adapting their companies in real time and where new problems — and potentially new markets — are emerging. And if you lead product or technology, you can compare how companies across different sectors are approaching many of the same decisions you’re making internally. The goal is to leave with a sharper view of the options in front of you. Across 200+ sessions and six stages, roundtables, and breakouts, you can prioritize the sessions that answer the questions that matter most to you now. Ask fellow speakers and attendees what worked. Ask what didn’t. Ask what they would do differently. Then take those answers back into your own decisions. Because the best thing you can bring home from TechCrunch Disrupt isn’t a notebook full of quotes. It’s a better idea of what to do next. Ticket savings forTechCrunch Disrupt 2026end September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.Register now to save up to $200 on your ticketand get a second ticket of the same type at 50% off. Groups of four or more can save up to 30%. Two days left.Bring your biggest questions. Leave with better ways to answer them.
What happens when the app you started in high school goes viral? For Zach Yadegari, the answer was more than 15 million downloads, $30 million in annual revenue, and an acquisition by MyFitnessPal — all before his 20th birthday. Yadegari was just 17 when he co-founded Cal AI, the AI-powered nutrition app that lets users track what they eat by snapping a photo. But those numbers leave out the part most founders would like to know: How did Cal AI get that kind of viral attention in the first place? And once millions of people showed up, how did the company make the most of that momentum? AtTechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Yadegari will take theBuilders Stagefor the fireside chat “How to Create Viral Growth and Capitalize On It.” He’ll get into Cal AI’s rapid growth, the product pressure that came with it, and the challenge of turning breakout attention into durable retention and long-term company building. Trying to break through in a crowded market?Save up to $200when you secure your pass by September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT and hear what Yadegari learned building a breakout consumer app. Got a colleague who’d like to join?Get a second pass for 50% off. Cal AIis built around a simple proposition: Snap a photo of a meal, and the app uses image recognition and the phone’s depth sensor to calculate calories, protein, carbs, and fat. Zach Yadegariwas still a high school senior when he co-founded Cal AI, but it wasn’t his first experience attracting a large online audience. At 16, he sold Totally Science, a gaming platform he founded that drew more than 5 million users during the COVID-19 pandemic, for six figures. Cal AI moved even faster. In less than two years, it had more than 15 million downloads and was generating more than $30 million in annual revenue. MyFitnessPal took notice, acquiring the company in a deal that closed in December 2025. The deal kept Cal AI as a stand-alone app, retained its seven-person team, and left Yadegari at the helm. At Disrupt, Yadegari will share what Cal AI learned about building in a distribution-driven market where a product can find a massive audience fast — and what it takes to exploit that viral growth when it happens. Chasing your own breakout moment? Get your Disrupt ticket to learn from Cal AI’s story. Save up to $200 on your pass and get a second pass for 50% off select ticket types.Secure your ticket by September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. For founders chasing growth, Yadegari’s story offers a look at both sides of a viral breakout: how a product finds a massive audience and what it takes to turn that attention into durable retention and long-term company building. Yadegari’s fireside chat is one of200+ sessions across six industry stagesatDisrupt, taking place October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. More than 10,000 founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders are expected, along with 250+ speakers, roundtables, and breakouts and 300+ exhibiting startups. Beyond the agenda, matchmaking, dealmaking, and networking give founders opportunities to connect with investors, potential customers, partners, and other builders working through many of the same challenges. These are the last two days to save up to $200 on your Disrupt pass.Secure your ticket by September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT — and get a second pass for 50% off select ticket types.Lock in your savings to hear Zach Yadegari share the lessons behind Cal AI’s viral success.
When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. But there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets. Upon digging into the problem, Du realized that there was a deeper issue that stemmed from how communication platforms were designed. “The deeper I went, the more I felt Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to pass us by,” Du told TechCrunch. “Agents were treated as apps you install even as they were becoming participants in the team.” The solution, Du thought, could be a system that eliminates “meat proxies,” as Du calls the phenomenon of people having to relay AI agents’ work to their teams. “The human effectively becomes the messenger between the agent and the rest of the company,” she said. An ideal system would instead let agents “participate in the shared conversations where work already gets coordinated,” Du said. “They should be able to understand why a decision was made, ask a colleague a question, build on another agent’s work, and bring in a human when judgment is needed.” Her startup,Ando, on Thursday came out of stealth with an app that sets out to do exactly that: It’s a team messaging platform designed for both human and AI workers. Ando bills itself as a full replacement for Slack or any other messaging platform that companies using AI agents might want for internal communication. The app gives agents their own identities and inboxes and lets them partake in conversations as naturally as people can. The app has channels, DMs, group conversations, and even live calls that can be transcribed and viewed by an agent, Du said. Agents can browse channels, pick which ones to join, and can even join conversations without being tagged. If a company’s agent thinks a human worker needs to be notified of something, it can message them on its own rather than waiting for approvals. To continue building the app, Ando on Thursday said it has raised $20 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Accel, Index Ventures, and Emergence. Du’s idea isn’t a new one. Most of the major players in the workplace collaboration space have already built in support for AI agents — Slack, for instance, has turned itsnative bot into an AI agent, and Microsoft has gone to great lengths to integrate Copilot into Teams in ways that connect to the rest of its Office 365 suite. But there is still a market for apps to challenge the incumbents given how quickly AI is invading workplaces. Just a few months ago, Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorseyannounced Buzz,which brings together people and AI agents into one messaging app, though it’s more targeted at developers. Du also feels there’s still enough of an advantage in building an AI-agent-native team messaging platform as legacy incumbents try to figure out how to pivot their existing software. Regardless, she seems to understand that Ando has an uphill battle ahead of it, and said that things were slow in the beginning. “A lot of people we showed it to early on were understandably unimpressed. It was, in many respects, just a jankier messaging platform. People would get stuck on that before they even got to what was different about the agents,” she explained. But she said her team knew they were onto something when more and more customers started using Ando for longer periods. With Ando, she started to see that agents could do more than people expect: An agent could notice two conversations being held in different channels about the same problem, and without being asked to, could bring everyone together in a group chat, explain the context, and even suggest a decision. “That was really delightful for me,” she said, “I felt agents could better manage people than humans can because they can process a lot more messages than a human can in a shorter span of time.” She said Ando is currently working with customers in software, real estate, and finance across 15 countries, though many of the teams it serves right now are small. The fresh capital will be used to hire more people and burn through more tokens, she said. “I think agents will let very small teams operate at a scale that previously required hundreds of people,” she said. “They can take on more of the execution, research, and coordination work, while humans spend more of their time on judgment, strategy, and deciding what should happen next.”
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