Category: Uncategorized

The funding comes on the back of a breakout first year for Emversity in which it expanded its footprint to 36 campuses across 18 Indian states.

Beyond Odds Technologies, parent of the skill-based training and higher-education platform Emversity, announced the close of a $5 Million Pre-Series A round. The round was led by Z47 and Lightspeed, with participation from Alteria Capital and Innoven Capital. 

The funding comes on the back of a breakout first year for Emversity in which it expanded its footprint to 36 campuses across 18 Indian states. The company has also launched Travel & Hospitality and is aiming to end the current financial year with more than 75 campuses. 

Under the ‘Emversity School of Allied Health Sciences’, students train for roles such as nurses, therapists, caregivers, OT technicians, lab technicians, paramedics and other allied-health professionals. The newly launched ‘Emversity School of Hospitality’ has partnered with two large hotel chains to offer skill-based training in rooms, F&B service, and culinary at nine campuses starting this year. 

Founded by Vivek Sinha, former COO of Unacademy, Emversity attempts to bridge the skilled-workforce gap in industries by embedding work-integrated, technology-driven training into degree programs at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Its model tackles what Sinha calls the “three-pronged problem” in the higher-education-to-workforce pipeline: capacity shortage, inaccessibility due to prohibitive fees and misaligned curriculum. 

“Millions of roles in healthcare, hospitality and construction lie vacant, while one-third of graduates remain unemployed,” Sinha explains.“Our employer-sponsored stipend model solves accessibility, industry co-designed curriculum ensures relevance, and our Centres of Excellence expand capacity.” 

“In a sector full of broken promises, quality and outcomes are our biggest differentiators. We stay obsessed with best-in-class training and employment results; scale will follow,” he adds. 

Commenting on the investment, Harsha Kumar, Partner at Lightspeedsaid, “Vivek and his team are bridging a systemic gap between education and employment by aligning training infrastructure with real industry demand, creating a more job ready workforce for critical sectors. What excites me the most is the non-linear impact Emversity can unlock by connecting global demand with the talent pipeline that they are developing.” 

Rajat Agarwal, Managing Director at Z47, led the investment, alongside Chandrasekhar Venugopal, Principal at Z47. Venugopal commented, “Rajat and I are privileged to partner with Vivek and the team at Emversity as they take on this hard, but critical problem facing the country. From the first meeting, Vivek’s insight on fixing the education-employment gap through a job relevant pedagogy stood out. In under a year, he’s taken Emversity from this insight to national scale, with real outcomes and smart unit economics. At Z47 we are thrilled to go deeper on this journey with Vivek as Emversity scales in size and impact.” 

source/content: thehindu.com (headline edited)

The company is developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks, said one of the the company’s two co-founders.

The government has selected Bengaluru-based start-up Sarvam to build the country’s first indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) amid waves made by China’s low cost model DeepSeek. The start-up, chosen from among 67 applicants, will receive support from the government in terms of compute resources to build the model from scratch.

Sarvam is the first start-up to get approved for sops under India’s ambitious Rs 10,370 crore IndiaAI Mission to build a model, with the government currently assessing hundreds of other proposals. Sarvam said its model will be capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, and it will be ready for population-scale deployment.

A senior official said in terms of government support, the company will receive access to 4,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for six months for the company to build and train its model. The model is not expected to be open-sourced, but will be fine-tuned particularly for Indian languages. The GPUs will be provided to Sarvam by companies separately selected by the government to set up AI data centres in India.

“This (Sarvam’s) model will have 70 billion parameters and many innovations in programming as well as engineering. With these innovations, a 70 billion parameter (model) can compete with some of the best in the world,” said IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

As part of Sarvam’s LLM proposal, the company is developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks, said Pratyush Kumar, one of the the company’s two co-founders.

The development comes amid the meteoric rise of DeepSeek, a low-cost foundational model from China, which shook up the AI industry. DeepSeek’s entry into the AI space – touted for being open source, its accuracy and claims that it has been built at a fraction of the cost as its US competitors – sent Nvidia’s stock on a downward spiral, since its R1 model was trained on inferior GPUs compared with the likes of OpenAI.

Sarvam’s model will be built, deployed, and optimised in India, using local infrastructure and developed by a new generation of Indian talent. This initiative aims to promote strategic autonomy, accelerate domestic innovation, and secure India’s leadership in AI for the long term, the company said in a press statement.

Vivek Raghavan, also a co-founder of Sarvam, said, “This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds. For citizens, this means interacting with AI that feels familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this means unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders”.

Earlier this year, the government had also selected 10 companies to supply 18,693 GPUs — high-end chips needed to develop machine learning tools — that can go into developing a foundational model. This is more than the initial aim of the IndiaAI Mission, under which the government was looking to procure 10,000 GPUs.

The companies empaneled to provide the GPU services include Jio Platforms, the Hiranandani Group-backed Yotta, Tata Communications, E2E Networks, NxtGen Datacenter, CMS Computers, Ctrls Datacenters, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Orient Technologies, and Vensysco Technologies.

source/content: indianexpress.com (headline edited)

The finale took place at Gurugram, Haryana on April 24. The final match was played between Karnataka and Punjab, in which Karnataka won by four runs.

The Karnataka Deaf Cricket team won the VIII National T20 Cricket Championship for the Deaf held at Kadarpur, Haryana. Held from April 19 to 25, the Karnataka team in the Group B category, played 5 matches, finally badging as the winner of the championship. The championship was organised by the All-India Sports Council of the Deaf, New Delhi, in collaboration with the Haryana Sports Council of the Deaf.

The finale took place at Gurugram, Haryana on April 24. The final match was played between Karnataka and Punjab, in which Karnataka won by four runs. Karnataka, which batted first, scored 177 for seven wickets and Punjab, chasing the target, came close to victory, but fell short by five runs (173), losing seven wickets. Karnataka’s skipper Subramani Singh scored the maximum runs (45), followed by vice-captain Souban Armar scoring 34 runs. In his four-over spell, Subramani Singh conceded 27 runs and claimed 2 wickets.

The members of the cricket team, who are from different parts of Karnataka, would practice by themselves in different private coaching centres and come together to practice once every week on the BLC ground. “The private coaching is very expensive, I had to pay Rs 1,000 per day for my son’s practice sessions,” shared Shiva Kumar, father of Kushal JS, one of the players.

We worked very hard to win this title and we are very happy that our hard work finally paid off, shared the team members. The winning came at an expenditure of Rs 10,000 per player. The match along with travel, food, practice and other expenses is a huge amount of money, which often creates a financial struggle for the player and their families. “Poor people like us struggle financially,” shares Shiva Kumar. But I ignore it to see the happiness on my son’s face,” he adds.

“We wish the government could fund us with sufficient money for the games, as they are just like Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. They too play for their homeland, finally winning the championship,” Kumar concludes.

source/content: newindianexpress.com (headline edited)