Eros just launched an AI creator platform — with a $5 million prize to find new stars

In conversation with Shradha Sharma, founder and CEO of YourStory, Eros Innovation executive Ridhima introduced Eros Universe at the AI Impact Summit 2026 as a new creator-focused platform built on the company’s GenAI stack.

Eros is best known in India for films and music, but Ridhima positioned the latest launch as part of a longer strategy to combine storytelling with new technology. She said the company has launched a GenAI initiative called Eros Gen AI, with a focus on creating its own AI technology in the form of “large cultural models.”

While most AI conversations revolve around large language models that predict the next word, Ridhima said Eros is training models meant to understand emotion, cinema grammar, Indian cultural narratives, and regional storytelling beats. The goal, she added, is to create content experiences that feel rooted in local culture rather than “westernised.”

To build these models, she cited the company’s entertainment library—about 12,000 movies—and said the training dataset totals around 1.5 trillion data tokens. She said the models are trained using Eros’ intellectual property built over roughly 50 years, enabling the system to pick up cultural nuance across genres and regions.

“Ab har Indian banega star”

The pitch for Eros Universe is creator-first. Ridhima said creative power in entertainment has historically sat with a limited set of studios, producers, and established stars. With Eros Universe, she said the company wants to put that power in the hands of the public by offering an app where users can create content using Eros’ IP layer and AI layer, and then distribute their stories through the platform.

The tagline she shared on stage captured the ambition: “Ab har Indian banega star.”

Soft launch now, rewards later

Ridhima said the app has started with a soft launch and is being opened up to creators gradually. To accelerate adoption and reward talent, she announced a $5 million prize planned for the end of the year, with a campaign to be built toward it.

She said the reward is not only about the cash prize, but also about creating real opportunities—if talent emerges in the ecosystem, creators could potentially work with Eros across films, series, and other projects.

A traditional company trying to stay ahead

Ridhima described the move as consistent with Eros’ history of adopting new distribution shifts early. She pointed to the company launching an OTT platform in 2012—well before streaming became mainstream in India—as an example of how it has tried to “embrace new tools” rather than stay stagnant.

Her message to founders at the summit was simple: learn from people around you, but keep conviction in your ideas—and execute.