Singapore-headquartered angel investment platform ThinKuvate has announced the first close of its India fund at INR 250 million. The investment comes within four months of the formal launch of the ThinKuvate India Fund — I.

The firm has made investments in four startups – Rosh.ai, Zippee, Pantherun, and NymbleUp.

Rosh.ai was founded in 2021 by Roshy John and Rajaram Moorthy. It specialises in autonomous vehicle technology, providing solutions for the automotive, seaport, and mining industries. The company has raised $1 million in Pre-Series A led by EV2 Ventures, with participation from Caret Capital and ThinKuvate.

Zippee was founded by Madhav Kasturia in 2021 and offers same-day delivery for more than 100 (D2C) brands. Zippee is scaling its operations in metro cities and expanding its brand partnership.

Founded in 2019 by Srinivas Shekar, Pantherun is a cybersecurity company specialising in advanced data protection solutions. The company has raised a bridge round led by QuickHeal Family Office and SIDBI Ventures, with participation from 8X, PiperSerica, and ThinKuvate.

NymbleUp.ai was founded in 2019 by Yogesh Bhatt & Manish Thakur. It has secured pre-series A  led by Chandigarh Angels, IVY Cap, and ThinKuvate. It provides AI-driven predictive workforce management solutions for QSRs and retail chains; forecasting demand across all sales channels at 15-minute intervals. 

ThinKuvate plans to invest in early-stage startups from seed to Series A, focusing on companies leveraging technology at the forefront.

Ghanshyam Ahuja, Managing Partner, ThinKuvate said, “We have been investing in Indian startups and saw the potential growth opportunities. That led us to launch an India-focused fund, we have reached the first milestone in little over 100 days. This validates our thesis on the next-gen innovations taking place in India, which have a global appeal.”

ThinKuvate continues to raise its target corpus, the fund plans to invest in 30 – 40 startups with an average investment size of INR 15 million to INR 40 million. The fund has also attracted top tier general partners globally, to manage the deal flow, due diligence, and overall portfolio management. More than 50 percent of investors in the fund are NRIs from various countries, top of them being Singapore, Australia, the USA, the UK, and Indonesia.

Mayank Jain, CEO, ThinKuvate, says, “We have built capabilities within our team to provide support and help to startups scale faster. The profile of limited partners, who are working professionals with senior roles in large corporates, would be a huge differentiator for the companies we back. Our vast network will not only bring in quality capital but provide access to the founders to accelerate their growth journey post funding from ThinKuvate. As we continue to raise the target corpus, we have already built a healthy deal flow and we are confident that with this fund, we will be able to build a strong portfolio and generate stellar returns for our investors.”

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Automotive supplier Valeo and Electronic Design Automation software provider Zuken have announced a strategic partnership to develop an open, artificial intelligence-assisted electronic design platform. The collaboration will operate under a joint program named the ‘Zuken Valeo InnoLab’.

The initiative integrates Zuken's AI architecture with Valeo’s custom AI agents and industrial data to create a real-time collaborative ecosystem between software tools and engineers. The primary objective of the program is to reduce hardware design timelines while maintaining structural robustness across complex automotive electronic systems.

The technical development framework spans the entire electronic design flow and is organised into four main operational areas:

• Functional Generative Design: Valeo will deploy its generative AI models within Zuken’s System Planner software to instantly generate and evaluate multi-criteria system architectures based on predefined corporate standards.
• Digital Continuity: Zuken’s open architecture will interface with Valeo’s existing digital ecosystem to provide end-to-end data traceability. This integration is designed to comply with the Automotive SPICE 4.0 (ASPICE4.0) Hardware Engineering process group standard, allowing Valeo's AI to process data and execute automated actions directly within the platform.
• Assisted Detailed Design: Valeo will integrate virtual AI copilot agents to assist engineering teams in real time with hardware rule verification, solution searching, and constraint implementations. Concurrently, Zuken is developing native AI functions to accelerate schematic entries by drawing from Valeo’s standardised components database.
• Automated Placement and Routing: Physical circuit integration will utilise Zuken’s Design Force engine, which features automated placement and routing algorithms. Valeo will use Zuken's software development kit to train the AI engine against specific automotive environmental and physical constraints to achieve correct initial executions.

Christophe Le Ligne, Vice-President – Research and Development, Valeo, said, “For Valeo, Zuken is much more than a software provider; it is a true innovation partner. The power of Zuken’s AI roadmap, combined with the exceptional openness of its architecture, allows us to hybridise our own artificial intelligence tools with their engine. This win-win partnership is the best way to tackle the challenge of automotive complexity by slashing our design times while guaranteeing 100% robustness.”

Ryosuke Takagi, Executive Officer and General Manager – R&D Division, Zuken, added, “Our vision at Zuken has always been to provide intelligent tools that adapt to our customers’ most complex challenges. Collaborating with a technological leader like Valeo pushes our ‘Autonomous Brain’ roadmap to its highest level of performance. By opening our System Planner, Design Gateway, and Design Force solutions to Valeo’s AI agents, we demonstrate that the true power of AI in engineering lies in the alliance between a high-performance software engine and expert industrial know-how.”

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Artificial intelligence software developer Helm.ai has launched two foundation models, GenSim-3 and VidGen-3, establishing a native Full HD (1920x1080) resolution standard for generative simulation across a 6-camera, 360-degree surround-view suite.

The architecture delivers 5x the pixel density of industry benchmarks to assist automotive developers facing the limitation where physical collection of edge cases becomes logistically restrictive.

Traditional generative world models typically cap resolution at roughly 0.4 megapixels per camera. Helm.ai’s platform outputs a native 2 megapixels per camera, yielding a synchronised 12-megapixel synthetic canvas per timestep. This specification matches the hardware parameters of production-grade vehicle cameras to reduce the domain gap for SAE Level 2 through Level 4 autonomous vehicle development.

The platform functions as a virtual sensor twin by mathematically replicating physical constraints and hardware anomalies, including lens flares, sensor banding patterns, and exposure blinding. To accommodate different neural network training routines, the pipeline can be configured to a high-speed validation mode using a three-camera setup at 30 frames per second, or a spatial context mode generating a six-camera surround view at 5 frames per second.

Data generation is split into two operational pipelines. GenSim-3 focuses on data augmentation by modifying environmental parameters such as weather, lighting, and object surfaces across real-world video segments at native 2MP resolution. VidGen-3 focuses on data creation, synthesising driving sequences from scratch by simulating environments, agent behaviours, and traffic logic without baseline video to patch geographic data gaps.

Helm.ai achieved the 2MP standard using a cluster of a few hundred GPUs rather than the thousands typically required for sub-HD video generation. This framework reduces the GPU infrastructure footprint for vehicle manufacturers and provides a method for compressing autonomous driving software onto mass-market on-vehicle compute chips.

Vladislav Voroninski, CEO and Founder, Helm.ai, said, "We are moving the industry from standard 'AI video' to authentic, hardware-accurate sensor emulation. By leading with a Full HD (2MP) standard and a 12-megapixel total aggregate capability per timestep, we have solved the resolution bottleneck that has historically limited the utility of generative AI in safety-critical systems. By optimising our compute architecture, we are giving our partners a high-performance platform to validate their autonomous stacks using synthetic data that perfectly matches the fidelity of their actual production sensors."

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Global automotive technology supplier Marelli has marked the 30th anniversary of its flagship electronics manufacturing plant in Guangzhou. Established in 1996 as Marelli’s inaugural manufacturing investment in China, the facility has transformed from a baseline assembly outpost into a major smart manufacturing and hardware-software validation centre.

Over the past three decades, the facility has expanded from a single operational production line with approximately 100 technicians into a 30,000-square-meter automotive electronics campus.

Today, the facility employs nearly 1,000 people and runs 66 active production lines, manufacturing components for both localised Chinese vehicle programs and global vehicle architectures.

The campus houses an adjacent, fully integrated Engineering Center that holds more than 100 registered patents. The manufacturing framework integrates high-precision assembly lines, automated optical bonding modules and site-wide rooftop solar arrays designed to manage factory energy overheads and lower operational carbon density.

The Guangzhou plant functions as a strategic industrialisation hub focused on low-cost, scalable architectures suited for the industry transition toward connected, software-defined vehicles (SDVs). The facility specialises in several high-growth hardware and display segments like advanced display solutions based on Mini-LED and MicroLED technologies. Additional key platforms include electronic control units (ECUs) for body and seat systems, zone control units, as well as digital cockpits, digital instrument clusters, and 5G telematics systems.

Ravi Tallapragada, President of Marelli’s Electronics business unit, said, “Our Guangzhou plant is a cornerstone of Marelli’s Electronics business in China and a powerful example of how innovation and advanced manufacturing can drive sustainable growth. Over the past 30 years, the team has continuously evolved its capabilities, developing advanced technologies and scalable platforms that address the rapid transformation of the automotive industry, building on long-standing collaboration with customers and partners. I’m proud of our team in Guangzhou and confident that the plant will continue to play a key role in shaping Marelli’s future globally.”

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Bosch MC Battery Service Innovations, a 50:50 joint venture established by Bosch and Mitsubishi Corporation, has secured its first commercial customer for its ‘Battery-as-a-Service’ (BaaS) solution. The platform has officially gone live with the opening of an automated energy service hub in Chizhou, Anhui Province.

The new logistical hub is owned and operated by Shanghai Lingzhou Technology Co. The site acts as a high-volume transit point configured specifically for heavy-duty electric trucks, allowing operators to either swap out spent battery packs or utilise fast-charging bays within a few minutes. The Chizhou station currently processes more than 100 commercial electric trucks per day.

The commercial roll-out aligns with rapid fleet electrification trends in China, where New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) accounted for nearly 30 percent of all heavy-duty truck sales in 2025. Internal market projections from Bosch indicate that over 50 percent of new truck registrations in the country will be fully electric by 2030.

The joint venture's business model separates the acquisition cost of the vehicle chassis from the battery chemistry, mitigating a core hurdle for corporate logistics fleets: accounting for unpredictable battery degradation and its subsequent impact on total cost of ownership (TCO) and residual vehicle asset valuation.

The operational framework of the joint venture utilises a collaborative technical and commercial division between both partners. As per the understanding, Bosch will provide the core software stack for the platform. Real-time operating metrics – including local ambient temperature profiles, instantaneous current loads and historical charging frequencies – are beamed continuously to cloud servers. The algorithms evaluate the exact state of health (SoH) of individual packs, run predictive wear modelling to catch cell stress anomalies and dynamically manage fast-charging protocols to minimise thermal strain.

On the other hand, Mitsubishi manages localised market deployment, regulatory anchoring and downstream financial underwriting. The data harvested through the tracking platform is being funnelled into integrated aftermarket networks to build commercial products, including predictive hardware maintenance contracts, connected usage-based fleet insurance packages and secondary-life battery storage applications.

Thomas Pauer, President of the Bosch Power Solutions division, said, "With this service, Bosch and Mitsubishi Corporation can create real added value for fleets. Although the state of health can decline due to ageing and many charging cycles, our solution allows fleet operators to keep an eye on the battery condition of their vehicles – a decisive criterion for the everyday suitability and total cost of ownership of a fleet."

Qian Yang, General Manager of the joint venture’s local subsidiary in China, said, "Our service hits a local nerve: We support battery-electric vehicles in the fleet business. This holistic approach accelerates the electrification of fleets and optimises the entire battery lifecycle. The combined expertise of Mitsubishi and Bosch is a perfect match for our customers."

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