This week in AI: OpenAI expands to India, Databricks eyes $100B
From OpenAI’s plan to set up its first India office in New Delhi to Databricks planning to raise a new round at a valuation topping $100 billion, AIStory brings a recap of major developments and emerging trends in the sector this week.
From OpenAI’s plan to set up its first India office in New Delhi to Databricks planning to raise a new round at a valuation topping $100 billion, AIStory brings a recap of major developments and emerging trends in the sector this week.
Here’s a list of key stories:
Featured news
‘The zero-to-one moment for LLMs is gone’: Zoho AI Director Ramprakash Ramamoorthy
While most SaaS companies are haemorrhaging cash to OpenAI and Google for AI capabilities, SaaS unicorn Zoho Corporationsurfed on a different bet. After 22 months of grinding through GPU shortages, hallucination fixes, and five model iterations, the Chennai-based unicorn has something to show for it: Zia LLM, an entirely in-house large language model that keeps customer data locked within Zoho’s ecosystem.
It has positioned the new LLM as a business-focused model with three parameter variants that keep enterprise data in-house.
“We dogfooded the baseline model extensively—Zoho runs on Zoho. Our employees tested it across products, gave feedback through a ticketing system, and we iterated continuously. It took us nearly two years to build and fine-tune the final version. We’re now on the fifth iteration of the model,” Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI Research, Zoho Corporation, tells YourStory.
How Cashfree Payment's Remote MCP is redefining payment integration for India's SMEs
Many small businesses and digital-first brands find integrating payments into their operation a complex, code-heavy, and slow process. The work of reading API docs, wiring backends, and standing up dashboards often delays go-to-market and inflates costs—an overhead large enterprises can easily absorb. Naturally, this technical barrier has created a deep divide, where merchants, such as food vendors and local service providers, get excluded from the digital payments revolution.
This is where Cashfree Payment’s Remote MCP comes in. The Bengaluru firm has built an AI-native payments engine, enabling merchants to initiate and manage payments directly through conversational interfaces, such as WhatsApp, without any coding or complex integrations. The fintech company—after introducing its Model Context Protocol (MCP) in April—has now become one of the first Indian fintechs to launch Remote MCP.
Latest news
OpenAI to set up its first India office in New Delhi
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI plans to open its first India office in New Delhi later this year, as it ramps up efforts in one of its fastest-growing AI markets. The office, whose exact location is yet to be finalised, will support the government’s IndiaAI mission and deepen OpenAI’s ties with local businesses, developers, and academic institutions.
The company, in a statement, said it has registered an entity in India and begun hiring a local team.
“The level of excitement and opportunity for AI in India is incredible. India has all the ingredients to become a global AI leader—amazing tech talent, a world-class developer ecosystem, and strong government support through the IndiaAI Mission. Opening our first office and building a local team is an important first step in our commitment to make advanced AI more accessible across the country and to build AI for India, and with India,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
Databricks to raise Series K funding at $100B valuation
Data and AI firm Databricks is set to raise a new round at a valuation topping $100 billion, after signing a term sheet for its Series K funding. The data and AI company, in a statement on Tuesday, said the round is expected to close soon with participation from existing investors. The fresh capital will primarily be utilised to fuel its AI strategy, expansion of its Agent Bricks platform, and global growth initiatives.
“We’re seeing tremendous investor interest because of the momentum behind our AI products, which power the world's largest businesses and AI services,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.
70% of startups want to upskill employees in AI, blockchain, product management: Imarticus Learning
More than 70% of startups are looking to upskill employees in artificial intelligence, blockchain, and product management, says a report by professional education company Imarticus Learning. The study, which analysed data from over 300 Indian and global corporates, highlights the growing adoption of the ‘hire-train-deploy’ model, which recorded a 15% year-on-year rise.
The report added that the ‘hire-train-deploy’ model is becoming increasingly popular, expanding 15% year-on-year as startups seek greater agility in hiring and workforce development.
Google Cloud launches 5 new AI agents for developers
Google Cloud has expanded its portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) offerings with the launch of five new AI agents designed to support developers, data scientists, and enterprise teams.
BigQuery data agent for automated pipelines The BigQuery Data Agent allows users to automate the creation of data pipelines using natural language prompts. The second release, the Notebook Agent, is a new enterprise version of Google’s NotebookLM platform embedded within BigQuery Notebooks.
Edited by Jyoti Narayan