Startup news and updates: daily roundup (February 19, 2026)

From record-breaking resilience on Mount Kilimanjaro to India’s AI roadmap, YourStory brings you the latest updates from the world of human excellence and artificial intelligence.

Featured stories:

How stroke survivor Jayashree Mohan became the fastest woman to ascend and descend Mount Kilimanjaro

In October last year, Jayashree Vijay Mohan achieved two Guinness World Records in the CIH (Coordination impairment – hemiplegia) category—for the fastest ascent and descent of Mount Kilimanjaro by a female climber. 

Behind this remarkable achievement lies a story of grit, resilience, and quiet determination. It is, in many ways, a triumph of mind and body, and of a spirit that refuses to surrender. 

Four years earlier, Jayashree suffered a stroke, and what followed was not a dramatic comeback, but months of slow, uncertain rebuilding. She had to relearn simple movements, including standing up, walking unaided, and trusting her own balance. Read more.

Latest news:

Sarvam AI unveils two new LLMs; says 105B model surpasses DeepSeek's R1 and Google's Gemini Flash on key benchmarks

Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam AI has introduced two new large language models, as it expands its role in India’s effort to build domestic AI systems.

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Sarvam AI Co-founder Pratyush Kumar said the company has trained a 30-billion-parameter model and a 105-billion-parameter model from scratch, using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to balance scale and efficiency. Read more.

Mukesh Ambani pledges Rs 10 lakh Cr for AI push, vows to make AI as cheap as data

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani unveiled plans to invest Rs 10 lakh crore in AI over the next seven years, marking one of the largest commitments to AI infrastructure announced in India.

Addressing the India AI Impact Summit, the Reliance Industries chairman positioned the initiative as the next phase of Jio’s digital transformation playbook—this time aimed at lowering the cost of computing power and AI access across the country.

The investment, beginning this year, will be deployed through Jio and Reliance to build what Ambani described as sovereign AI infrastructure at scale. “Jio, together with Reliance, will invest Rs 10 lakh crore over the next seven years,” he said, adding that the capital outlay is “not speculative” but intended to create long-term economic and strategic value. Read more.

Funding news:

EV charging network provider Statiq raises $18M in funding round led by Tenacity Ventures

EV charging network Statiq raised $18 million in a fresh funding round led by Tenacity Ventures, with participation from existing investors Y Combinator and Shell Ventures, along with RCD Holdings.

The startup will use the new funds to scale its infrastructure and expand its presence across Tier I and II cities. It will also deploy a portion of the funds to help expand DC fast chargers across its networks along key highways. It also aims to deploy the capital to improve hardware lifecycle and advanced telematics for scaling, as well as help exports to the UAE pilots.

Pluto Mobility raises $2M seed funding for last-mile EVs

Delhi-based Pluto Mobility raised $2 million in a seed round led by Version One Ventures, with participation from Grad Capital and founders and executives from Delhivery, OfBusiness, Pixxel, and Boom Supersonic.

Founded by Akshat Bhatia and Himanshu Panda, the startup builds scooter-sized, fully covered electric vehicles designed for delivery workloads. Pluto said its vehicles can carry “2x more orders than a usual 2-wheeler” and are engineered “from the ground up by rethinking core engineering and design around real-world delivery use cases”.

“India’s last-mile challenge isn’t speed, incentives, or apps. It’s that delivery operations are built on vehicles never designed for delivery workloads,” said Akshat Bhatia. Pilot deployments are planned for 2026.

Other news:

CoinDCX announces Rs 111 Cr ESOP buyback

CoinDCX announced a Rs 111 crore ESOP buyback for over 500 current and former employees, calling it its largest liquidity event to date.

“The Indian crypto industry has navigated an incredibly demanding landscape,” said Sumit Gupta. “This buyback is more than just a financial milestone; It is our way of ensuring that those who stayed the course and fueled our mission can share in the tangible value they’ve helped build,” he said.

Founded in 2018, CoinDCX serves over 2 crore users and expanded internationally through the acquisition of BitOasis. The company said the move reflects its financial position and long-term strategy.

NVIDIA, AI Grants India aim to support 500 startups

AI Grants India (AIGI) will collaborate with NVIDIA to support early-stage founders through the NVIDIA Inception programme, aiming to help up to 500 AI startups over the next 12 months.

The initiative is expected to support over 10,000 founders with access to AI models, technical training and infrastructure. Startups will receive guidance and access to NVIDIA developer tools and ecosystem benefits.

“India’s next wave of AI innovation will be built by early teams that have the technical depth to execute, but need faster access to the right tooling, mentorship, and ecosystem pathways,” said Bhasker (Bosky) Kode, Co-founder, AI Grants India.

“NVIDIA is accelerating this momentum by giving founders direct access to accelerated computing,” said Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups and Venture Capital at NVIDIA.

PhonePe rolls out biometric authentication for UPI payments

PhonePe launched biometric authentication for UPI payments, allowing users to authorise transactions using fingerprint or facial recognition for payments up to Rs 5,000.

The fintech company said the feature leverages device-level biometric verification as a secure two-factor authentication layer and includes a fallback to UPI PIN if biometric authentication fails. Transactions above Rs 5,000 will continue to require a UPI PIN.

“At PhonePe, our goal has always been to make digital payments as intuitive and accessible as possible for every Indian,” said Deep Agrawal, Head of Payments at PhonePe. “By integrating biometric authentication, we are taking a significant step toward a truly frictionless payment experience,” he said.

The feature is currently available for Android users.

NxtGen AI deploys sovereign AI factory with Vertiv infrastructure

NxtGen AI deployed a national-scale sovereign AI factory in India, supported by Vertiv’s data centre infrastructure and accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.

The deployment includes more than 4,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs through Dell Integrated Rack Scalable Systems, running on Dell PowerEdge XE9685L liquid-cooled servers. Vertiv is delivering power and thermal systems, including UPS, lithium-ion energy storage, and liquid cooling.

“Building a national-scale AI Factory requires not just accelerated computing, but a resilient and scalable AI infrastructure foundation,” said A. S. Rajgopal, MD and CEO, NxtGen AI.

“Vertiv’s 360AI approach enables NxtGen AI to deploy a highly efficient, scalable, and future-ready infrastructure,” said Subhasis Majumdar, Managing Director, Vertiv India.

Mirror Security, NVIDIA partner on encrypted AI inference

Mirror Security collaborated with NVIDIA to bring GPU-accelerated Fully Homomorphic Encryption to AI inference for regulated workloads.

The platform integrates NVIDIA CUDA, cuBLAS, NeMo, NeMo Retriever and TensorRT-LLM to enable encrypted AI inference and secure AI memory. The companies said the approach allows data to remain encrypted during computation and storage.

“Sovereignty isn't about where your data lives; it's about controlling what happens to it when your intelligence runs,” said Pankaj Thapa, Co-founder and CEO, Mirror Security.

“NVIDIA is accelerating this momentum by giving founders direct access to accelerated computing,” said Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups and Venture Capital at NVIDIA.

(This article will be updated with the latest news throughout the day.)