Category technology

Toronto, Canada – February 25, 2026; Insurance is complicated. Customers have questions before they quote, need guidance after, and expect clarity when they file a claim. But the work of answering those questions, collecting documents, and following up still runs on calls, emails, and portals stitched together by manual effort. For brokers and carriers, this coordination overhead is one of the most operationally expensive and taxing parts of the business.

 General Magic is building AI agents to solve this problem.

 The company announced a US$7.2M seed funding round led by Radical Ventures, with significant participation from a16z Speedrun and new investment from Figma VP of Product Brendan O’Driscoll and Larry James Erwin from OpenAI. The company has raised $8.4M to date, backed by Radical Ventures, a16z Speedrun, and Comma Capital, along with operators who have built foundational AI and product platforms, including Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, as well as the executive team at Braze, including Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer, and Spencer Burke, SVP of Growth.

 General Magic builds AI agents that take over the work insurance teams spend the most time on: answering routine questions, collecting documents, and following up with customers when clarity matters. These agents work across the full insurance lifecycle, covering pre-quote eligibility, post quote engagement, and claims coordination. They do all of this while connecting directly to broker management systems, quoting platforms, and CRMs. 

 Early deployments show what’s possible. Working with one of the world’s largest general insurers, General Magic has reduced time-to-quote from roughly 30 minutes down to under 3 minutes via its SMS-based agent. 

 “Too much of insurance still relies on manual follow through across calls, inboxes, and scattered systems,” said Jai Mansukhani, Co Founder and President of General Magic. “We focus on keeping customers engaged at every stage of the lifecycle, not just at quote or claim. Our agents handle the routine work that slows teams down, while giving insurance leaders real visibility into what customers are asking, where they are getting stuck, and how they are feeling. When that engagement and data flow directly into core systems, teams move faster and customers feel genuinely supported.”

 The company’s agentic offerings are centered around a product called Cell, a proactive AI agent that connects directly to the systems insurance teams already use. Cell integrates with broker management systems, quoting and rating platforms and CRMs to support teams. It can be deployed across SMS, iMessage and RCS, and can extend into policy, billing and claims workflows as needed.

When a customer has a question, they can text Cell over SMS, or the insurance team can proactively deploy it to the customer. The agent responds using real system data, asks for missing information, follows up automatically, and updates records as workflows progress. Conversations stay in one thread, context is preserved, and customers move forward at their own pace without being chased or dropped.

 Early deployments point to the scale of the opportunity. In early rollouts with large personal lines insurers, General Magic is reducing the time required to generate and finalize quotes from roughly 30 minutes to about 3 minutes by automating routine clarification and follow-ups over SMS across auto and life insurance workflows. This increase in speed expands effective quoting capacity while keeping customers engaged through the most failure prone part of the journey after a quote is issued. By handling frequent questions and coordination over text, the agent reduces delays and prevents conversations from stalling. General Magic is currently supporting deployments with carriers across auto and life insurance, where post-quote and customer coordination are most critical.

 In parallel, the team is focused on building agents that understand the realities of insurance distribution, including licensing and regulatory frameworks such as RIBO, OTL, and other broker and advisor exams. By specializing agents around how licensed professionals are trained to communicate, General Magic aims to ensure conversations feel accurate, compliant, and aligned with how insurance teams actually explain coverage to customers.

 General Magic was founded by Anthony Azrak and Jai Mansukhani, second-time founders who previously sold AI products into legacy industries. The company’s move into insurance came from firsthand frustration. After a water leak spiraled into weeks of calls, delays, and higher premiums, the founders began exploring how common this experience really was. What they found was an industry that technically works, but often fails customers and intermediaries in the moments that matter most. That insight shaped General Magic’s decision to go deep into insurance rather than remain a horizontal AI platform.

 The broader industry context underscores the urgency. Retention rates in insurance lag behind other sectors, and acquiring new customers costs significantly more than keeping existing ones. As digital distribution accelerates and customers shop more aggressively at renewal, both carriers and brokers that fail to improve post-quote engagement risk losing revenue they already worked to win.

Looking ahead, General Magic plans to expand across insurance lines and workflows, staying focused on moments where customer intent is high and coordination most often breaks down. The platform is being built to support high impact workflows across the insurance stack, prioritising areas where follow-through fails today and where fixing it creates meaningful value for customers, brokers, and carriers.

 The long term vision is simple but ambitious: make follow through automatic, reliable, and invisible. By removing the need for manual chasing and fragmented handoffs, teams can spend less time managing processes and more time serving end customers. The team is motivated by solving complex, real world problems that sit at the center of insurance operations, with the goal of delivering tangible improvements to how people experience insurance when it matters most.

 Sanjana Basu, partner at Radical Ventures, commented: “Most of the world’s financial and insurance data is locked inside rigid, legacy systems that were never designed for the AI era. General Magic isn’t trying to convince enterprises to throw away that infrastructure. Instead, they are giving them a way to finally talk to it. By building a reasoning layer that sits on top of existing systems of record, the General Magic team are unlocking a massive amount of trapped value. This is how the Fortune 500 becomes AI-native. Not by rebuilding from scratch, but by bridging the gap between old data and new intelligence.” 

Troy Kirwin, investment partner at a16z Speedrun, added: “We’ve watched Anthony and Jai grow exponentially both during their speedrun cohort and in the months after. They are building a truly compelling product that we believe will revolutionize workflows across insurance carriers and brokerages globally. I have a personal thesis that outsiders will disrupt legacy industries, and General Magic has helped buttress this thesis with the immense progress they’ve made. We are excited to deepen our partnership through supporting their seed round.” 

Pete Tessier, BFA, CAIB, President at insurance MGA Taycon Risk, added: “What I have seen with General Magic and their approach to AI was a willingness to adapt to the insurance industry’s needs. This is significant because of the varied nuances of the insurance industry and how its products are distributed, and why internal and external customer journeys are different. The challenge will be making it scale across all channels of insurance product distribution. This might be the first true ‘game changer’ for the industry and deliver on customer experience and expectations” 

Switzerland, Feb 24 — The Hashgraph Group (THG), the Swiss-based Web3 and AI technology engineering company operating within the Hedera ecosystem, has today announced the launch of TrackTrace, deployed as a fully managed enterprise-grade solution that transforms and enhances global supply chain transparency through real-time tracking of products from origin, ethical sourcing, and carbon emissions data.

TrackTrace enables the certification of product authenticity and immutable data audit trails, while providing end-to-end transparency and traceability through cryptographically verified decentralized identifiers (DIDs). The platform creates verifiable audit trails of product-specific data, sustainability credentials, durability, reparability, and various other product data, while applying Agentic AI for workflow automation and compliant DPP reporting.

TrackTrace enables the linkage between physical events and digital records in a tamper-proof environment by integrating THG’s existing product IDTrust to provide decentralized identity and verifiable credentials, with digital executable business processes and immutable data audit trails anchored on Hedera – the world’s leading and most energy-efficient distributed ledger technology (DLT) that is governed by a council of leading global organisations such as Dell, Deutsche Telecom, EDF, FedEx, Google, Hitachi, IBM, Mondelēz, and Standard Bank, just to name a few of the over 30 Hedera Council members.

Built for enterprises, TrackTrace supports compliance with the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which introduces mandatory sustainability and circularity norms across various regulated product categories. The requirement for a digital product passport applies to all products, including all components and intermediate products manufactured or put into operation in the EU. Under the ESPR framework, all products will require a digital record, typically accessed via QR code, containing data on a product’s origin, composition, sustainability credentials, and lifecycle.

The Hashgraph Group’s efforts to evolve in accordance with regulatory changes are echoed across the Hedera ecosystem, with the recent announcement by FedEx that it has joined the Hedera Council to advance trusted digital infrastructure for global shipments and the future of digital global supply chains. TrackTrace is designed and built to enable the digital evolution of global supply chains by leveraging the convergence of agentic intelligence and workflow automation with decentralization and trusted data infrastructure, offering enhanced digital visibility, governance, and compliance across entire product lifecycles and environments.

“The European Green Deal strives to establish the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 and needs infrastructure it can trust to transform Europe into a modern, efficient, and sustainable, economy,” said Stefan Deiss, Co-Founder & CEO at The Hashgraph Group. “With TrackTrace built on Hedera, we deliver that critical trust data infrastructure layer that enables companies to comply with DPP regulation, while strengthening global supply chain integrity and fostering the transition to a sustainable, transparent, and circular economy.”

Set to come into force in 2027, the DPP regulation will apply to categories including textiles, construction materials, batteries and electronics, fundamentally reshaping how products are designed, tracked, and reported across the European market. For businesses targeting the EU market, DPP becomes a strategic priority that requires urgent focus to ensure compliance with the ESPR. According to PwC, the DPP initiative will redefine how products are designed, produced, recycled, and managed across the EU. THG and PwC are already collaborating with enterprises that need to implement DPP in compliance with ESPR, leveraging TrackTrace to provide transparency, traceability, and auditability across the entire lifecycle of a product.

Micha Roon, Head of Engineering at The Hashgraph Group said, “In designing TrackTrace, we prioritized interoperability to ensure it communicates seamlessly with existing enterprise ERPs and diverse supply chain standards. We have embedded GDPR compliance by design, allowing businesses to share mandatory compliance data without exposing any sensitive intellectual property or personal information. Ultimately, our architecture leverages Hedera’s consensus algorithm to deliver quantum-resistant data security, ensuring that every digital product passport is both immutable and verifiable across global supply chain borders.”

The digital product passport also has implications for global trade since it does not only affect companies based in the EU. For instance, all products exported into the EU market, regardless of the country of manufacture, must have a corresponding DPP. For companies seeking to maintain market access, export products, and remain competitive within the EU market, time is of the essence to integrate DPP now into their product strategy, design, and operations.

Designed for deployment in space-constrained industrial robotic solutions, the de next-RAP8-EZBOX packs 13th Gen Intel Core processing into a system measuring just 95.5mm x 69.5mm x 42.5mm.

(Taipei, Taiwan – Feb 24) Edge computing leader AAEON (Stock Code: 6579) announced another breakthrough with the release of the de next-RAP8-EZBOX, the world’s smallest embedded PC powered by 13^th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors.

Measuring just 95.5mm x 69.5mm x 42.5mm with a heatsink, and 95.5mm x 69.5mm x 45.4mm with an active cooler, the de next-RAP8-EZBOX is designed for deployment in space-constrained autonomous systems or as the central controller within industrial robots.

The system comes with the 10-core, 12-thread Intel® Core™ i7-1365UE processor (formerly Raptor Lake), Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics, and 16GB of soldered LPDDR5x system memory. Despite its small size and relatively high processing capabilities, the de next-RAP8-EZBOX provides a range of I/Os designed to connect and coordinate with various robotics subsystems. For example, the system comes with two LAN ports, one for GbE and one for 2.5GbE speed, joined by two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. Rounding off its physical interfaces is an HDMI 1.2a port. Meanwhile, the de next-RAP8-EZBOX’s storage comes via an M.2 2280 M-Key slot.

The de next-RAP8-EZBOX is available with both fan-assisted and passive heatsink cooling options, making it possible to integrate the system into fully sealed enclosures without the risk of overheating. Moreover, the system’s 15W performance hybrid architecture CPU and LPDDR5x system memory both minimize heat output and energy draw, preventing excessive thermal buildup during extended periods of operation.

Despite it being a new release, the product has already seen a great deal of attention, winning a Taiwan Excellence Award for its innovative design and market potential, particularly with respect to its potential use in space-constrained autonomous systems or as a central controller within industrial robots.

The system offers broad compatibility with operating systems, including Windows® 10 and Ubuntu 22.04.3 (Kernel 6.2).

New Delhi, Feb 24: Sapaad, a bootstrapped, Make-in-India cloud-based restaurant technology company with a strong global footprint, today announced its participation at AAHAR 2026, to be held from 10th – 14th March, 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi. At the upcoming edition of India’s leading food and hospitality industry exhibition, Sapaad will showcase its enterprise-grade, cloud-native restaurant technology solutions designed to support the evolving needs of organised and growth-focused foodservice brands across the country.

Vishnu Vardhan Madabhushi, Founder & CEO, Sapaad, said, “Across global and Indian markets, the foodservice industry is being reshaped by rising operational complexity, multi-channel demand and cost pressures, making real-time visibility and data-led decision-making critical for sustainable growth. In India, high-growth formats such as cloud kitchens, QSRs and café chains are expected to grow at around 12–14% CAGR, compared to 5–7% for unorganised formats, highlighting the need for scalable, enterprise-grade digital infrastructure. At AAHAR 2026, we will showcase our unified, cloud-native platform with live demonstrations, highlighting how restaurant brands can streamline operations and leverage AI-driven insights to build scalable, future-ready businesses. With our interactive conversational tool and a unified one-stack platform, we plan to capture at least 8 to 10% of India’s organised food services space by 2030.

After a decade of successful global operations, the company has entered the Indian market to bring its proven technology solutions to support the country’s rapidly growing food services sector. India’s organized food services market is expected to reach approx. US$120–125 billion by 2030, from an estimated US$78 billion in 2025 with roughly 60% absolute growth over the period. The company’s participation in AAHAR 2026 aligns with its broader India market strategy, which focuses on serving the organised and technology-ready segment of the country’s foodservice ecosystem and enabling operators to adopt scalable, reliable and future-ready digital infrastructure.

At AAHAR 2026, Sapaad will present live demonstrations of its solutions – Cloud-Native Restaurant POS its unique AI conversational BI tool Ask Vantage. Built inside Sapaad’s Unified Commerce platform, Ask Vantage analyses real-time signals across POS, inventory, recipes, purchasing, labour, and delivery channels, delivering actionable intelligence on the go. Sapaad’s solutions play a critical role in enabling restaurants, cafés and QSR chains, cloud kitchens and multi-outlet brands to digitise and streamline end-to-end operations, from ordering and payments to kitchen operations, inventory, analytics and AI-driven decision support.

Sapaad will be exhibiting at AAHAR 2026 in Hall 14 – First Floor (14FF), Booth No. 14F-12-D. Alongside live demonstrations, visitors will have the opportunity to engage with the company’s leadership and product teams, and discover Sapaad’s modular cloud-first platform enables multi-format restaurant operations and scalable digital infrastructure for both Indian and international food service brands.

Driver redesign led by Bootlin sees GPIO forwarder library and pinctrl driver merged into Linux 6.18 release. 

(Eindhoven, The Netherlands – Feb 23) AAEON’s UP brand, a leading provider of professional developer boards, is excited to announce that full Linux kernel support for its UP Squared series’ 40-pin I/O header has been officially merged into the Linux 6.18 release.

Following the brand’s 10-year anniversary last May, UP outlined its intention to complete the upstreaming of its DKMS drivers to the Linux mainline kernel. This objective was part of a broader set of initiatives aimed at providing users with a more streamlined route from concept to project deployment.

Upstream support is a goal that AAEON had been working towards for a number of years. However, coordinating the FPGA and Intel® SoCs on UP hardware has made mainline Linux support for the 40-pin header a challenge.

To resolve this issue and assist in pushing the project to completion, AAEON approached Bootlin, a leading embedded Linux and open-source development company. Bootlin’s embedded Linux development expertise was instrumental in resolving the pain points encountered during previous attempts to upstream support for its 40-pin header. By rewriting the pinctrl driver to remove Intel-specific code, adding a GPIO forwarder library, and extending the gpio-aggregator driver to create a reusable library, full upstream support was achieved. As a result, the UP Squared series’ 40-pin header now supports GPIO, I²C, UART, and SPI out-of-the-box on mainline Linux 6.18.

“This achievement is the result of a multi-year effort and close collaboration with Bootlin, and one that will provide a huge benefit to the entire UP community,” said Victor Lai, Managing Director of UP and AAEON Europe. “With upstream integration for our UP Squared series now established, we are already working hard to expand this support across our product family and help even more users transform their ideas into real-world successes.”

ARE report finds JSW Energy and Tata Power best positioned for firm-power era; NTPC’s execution critical as coal economics tighten 

SINGAPORE / NEW DELHI, INDIA, Feb 23 - India’s power sector is entering a decisive new phase as electricity demand surges, peak loads hit record highs, and the country moves toward its 500GW non-fossil capacity target by 2030 post a record 52GW capacity added in FY26But the next chapter of the transition will not be defined by installed capacity alone. 

A new report by Asia Research & Engagement (ARE), Powering Net Zero: Pathways to Clean Energy for India’s Utility Companies, finds that the market is shifting toward firm, dispatchable and availability-linked power — creating clear divergence among India’s largest listed utilities. 

The analysis identifies: 

• JSW Energy and Tata Power as best placed to monetise the transition, combining contracted renewable growth, storage depth and improving cashflow quality. 
• Adani Green Energy remains the fastest capacity scaler with strong long-term visibility, though storage integration remains at an early stage. 
• NTPC, India’s largest generator, retains unmatched scale and sovereign-backed financing, but its transition outcomes hinge on execution speed and managing coal’s declining role. 
• Adani Power remains predominantly thermal, with limited exposure to the structural upside from renewables and storage. 

The report also highlights tightening coal economics. While new ultra-supercritical coal plants clear bids at INR5. 5–6 per kWh, effective delivered costs rise materially once utilisation, fuel volatility and compliance costs are factored in. By comparison, round-the-clock and storage-backed renewable projects are clearing between INR2.7–5.1 per kWh with availability guarantees embedded in contracts. 

“The debate is no longer coal versus renewables,” said Arun Kumar, Strategic Advisor for Power Markets & Technology Innovation at ARE and lead author of the report. “As procurement shifts toward round-the-clock supply, reliability and execution — not just megawatts — will determine competitive advantage.” 

 “While this ARE study highlights significant momentum across the sector, it also identifies areas where sharper strategic clarity, improved contracting frameworks, and stronger delivery capabilities will be essential to meeting India’s long-term decarbonisation goals.” 

One of the most advanced bike-fitting studios worldwide is tapping into the benefit of Flir thermal imaging technology to push the boundaries of sports science and biomechanics at all levels of cycling.

Located in Antwerp, Belgium, Bikefit Van Staeyen uses Flir-generated infrared images to visualize body heat and pressure distribution in real time, subsequently optimizing rider position and bike set up.

Bikefit Van Staeyen offers professional bike fitting based on more than 20 years of experience in cycling. Founded by brothers Kevin and Michael Van Staeyen (a former professional road racing cyclist), the business has built its success on extensive expertise in sports science, biomechanics and cycling. What started as a passion for precision and performance evolved into one of the world’s most advanced bike-fitting studios.

The principal differentiator of Bikefit Van Staeyen is its dual-expert approach: every bike fit is performed by both brothers working together, merging technical analysis and professional cycling experience with medical understanding.

“This synergy allows us to identify patterns and dysfunctions far beyond what conventional systems can capture,” explains Kevin.

Real-time insight

Central to the process is the use of advanced thermal imaging technology from Flir, which provides a real-time view into physiological asymmetries, pressure distribution, and underlying muscular imbalances. 

“We use a Flir infrared camera to study a heat map of a rider pedaling to optimize body position and bike set up,” says Kevin. “By combining thermography with motion tracking, force analysis, and EMG [electromyographic] data, we can see what others can only guess: how the rider’s body reacts, compensates, and adapts under load. We’ve named our thermography application ‘Lava.flow’, a process that allows us to understand and optimize injury-prone areas, muscle activation, and pressure points in a completely new way.”

Bikefit Van Staeyen initially used a Flir E76 thermal imaging camera but has since migrated to the newer E96. The E96 is Flir’s first pistol-grip camera with 640 × 480 thermal resolution, allowing users to survey targets safely and quickly. This advanced sensor offers complete coverage of near and distant targets through a range of lens options. In addition, Flir Ignite provides the automatic uploading of E96 images directly from the camera to the cloud for easy, secure storage and sharing.

As pioneers in thermal analysis for cycling applications, Bikefit Van Staeyen works in close collaboration with Thermal Focus, a Flir Platinum Partner and stockist of the largest selection of Flir infrared cameras in the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) region.

Temperature in focus

The hot spots and cold spots identified by Flir thermal cameras serve as direct indicators of how a cyclist’s body functions on the bike. An excessive temperature increase in certain areas can indicate overexertion, friction, or poor posture. 

Using the Flir E96, Bikefit Van Staeyen can: detect hot spots and elevated pressure zones on the saddle, shoes, or handlebars; identify asymmetric muscle loading and unbalanced activation patterns; analyze vascular restrictions that may lead to numbness or reduced performance; and detect thermal irregularities that could indicate overload.

With this in-depth thermal analysis, the brothers are able to identify a range of issues that prompt adjustments for the optimal riding experience. For instance, asymmetric heat distribution around the kneecap points to a possible biomechanical problem, while too much heat in the ball of the foot typically means incorrect positioning of the cleat position. Similarly, increased temperature in the lower back could be the result of a compensatory mechanism or incorrect saddle adjustment.

“While traditional bike fits are often based on observation and feel, we use objective, data-driven measurements from the Flir thermal camera,” reveals Kevin. “Our Lava.flow process gives us unique, real-time insight into how a rider’s body responds while cycling. By way of example, we recently helped a cyclist experiencing unexplained knee pain during rides. Using our Flir infrared imaging technology, we observed excessive heat accumulation in the tibia [tibialis anterior muscle]. Thanks to the Flir imaging of this increased heat and our leg length software, we discovered that this leg was structurally shorter and that the rider had to pull the pedal excessively upward when cycling, resulting in knee pain.”

All levels of cyclist

Cyclists turning to Bikefit Van Staeyen for assistance range from dedicated amateurs to World Tour professionals. They trust the company for the same reason: attention to detail. From saddle pressure to neural load; from crank dynamics to thermal asymmetry – no variable is left unexplored. The company is also pioneering the bike-fit domain at university level, a first in Europe, by collaborating with the University of Antwerp to integrate data-driven approaches.

“We want to serve as the fundamental partner and reference point for thermal camera technology within the sport of cycling,” concludes Kevin. “Our ambition is to help shape the future of performance diagnostics, not just for our own athletes, but as a knowledge and technology hub for teams and riders worldwide. With our expertise and experience we can demonstrate the immense potential of thermography in biomechanical and performance analysis.”

Chandigarh, Feb 20: In a decisive step towards accelerating EV mainstreaming, TATA.ev, India’s leading provider of zero emission personal mobility solutions, today launched the new avatar of its popular Punch.ev, ushering in the next wave of mass EV adoption in India. Designed to democratize entry level electric mobility, the new Punch.ev brings together everything customers seek in not just their first electric car but also their first household car, by holistically addressing the key barriers limiting EV ownership—affordability, range confidence, charging convenience, and battery assurance; thereby solving the full equation for mainstream EV adoption at scale.

Launched at an attractive introductory price of just INR 9.69 lakh the new Punch.ev brings EV ownership to near on‑road price parity with ICE offerings in the entry‑level small‑car segment

TATA.ev is also offering the option of BaaS, starting at INR 6.49 lakh with a Battery EMI of INR 2.6 / km, enabling an alternative financing option for customers.

Launching the new Punch.ev, Shailesh Chandra, Managing Director, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicle Ltd. and Tata Passenger Electric Mobility Ltd., said,

“The new Punch.ev, makes electric mobility truly accessible, practical and worry free for every household. With a real-world range of ~355 km, fast charging capability, a lifetime HV battery warranty and a highly accessible price point, it resolves the core concerns that have thus far held customers back from choosing an entry level EV as their primary car. By bringing together everything customers seek in their preferred car for both daily and long-distance travel, the new Punch.ev marks a significant leap forward in the democratization of electric mobility in India.”

Beyond Limits

Built on the advanced acti.ev architecture, the new Punch.ev takes pure EVs to the next level. Having pioneered the subcompact SUV category while retaining its spot as one of India’s most loved SUVs, the Punch in its EV avatar is an undeniable choice for a wide spectrum of buyers.

Addressing Range Anxiety with longer real-world range and a larger battery pack

With a larger 40 kWh LFP prismatic cell battery pack delivering a higher and more meaningful real-world C75 range ~355 km and ARAI certified (P1+P2) range 468 kms, the new Punch.ev is ideal for everyday city use and short intercity trips, with reduced need for frequent charging stops. Additionally, the new Punch.ev will also be offered with a new 30kWh battery pack option. With these two options combined, the new Punch.ev enables a seamless transition for customers from ICE to electric, delivering superior drive quality, lower running and maintenance costs, and uncompromised every day or long distance travel on a single charge.

Faster charging, more driving:

With fast charging support, the battery can quickly charge from 20% to 80% in just 26 minutes. Furthermore, it easily tops up the battery with 135 Km of real-world range in just 15 minutes, roughly the time of a quick tea or coffee break on long drives

Lifetime Battery Warranty covering unlimited km:

The new Punch.ev comes with a Lifetime HV Battery Warranty covering unlimited KM, providing long-term coverage on the most critical EV components, giving first time owner customers added reassurance during ownership.

Rapidly Expanding Charging Ecosystem:

TATA.ev’s charging network covers over 2.3 lakh charging points across 1,500 cities through home, community and partners’ public charging. TATA.ev has aggregated over 30,000 public chargers in collaboration with over 30 charge point operators. Customers can check for the real time availability/status of active chargers via IRA.ev app for seamless navigation and end to end payments. TATA.ev monitors the reliability of public chargers and has curated a ‘.ev Verified’ charger network, comprising of 2,500+ fast, secure and highly reliable charging points across 500 cities and towns. Elevating the charging experience to world class levels, TATA.ev has established India’s largest superfast charging network- 450+ charging points across 130+ Mega Charging Hubs on 80 highways- this footprint will expand to 800 charging points by FY26.

Bengaluru, Feb 20: Blue Machines AI and Cartesia today announced a strategic partnership to deliver India-first conversational AI solutions for Indian enterprises, with an initial focus on regulated sectors such as BFSI and healthcare.

As Indian enterprises shift from pilots to production-scale conversational AI, two priorities have become clear: the need for natural multilingual voice experiences that reflect India’s linguistic diversity and India-resident processing aligned with regulatory expectations. Together, Blue Machines and Cartesia deliver enterprise-grade intelligent voice agents that seamlessly understand intent, execute complex workflows, integrate with existing systems, and respond naturally with ultra-low latency across regional languages. By uniting state-of-the-art voice technology with advanced real-time orchestration capabilities – the partnership enables organizations to deploy scalable, context-aware voice solutions that drive operational efficiency and enhanced customer experiences.

India-resident data processing ensures compliance with regulatory, governance, and auditability requirements – critical for enterprises operating in highly regulated sectors. Multilingual capabilities spanning Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi enable enterprises to deliver culturally relevant and hyper localized interactions across customer care, onboarding, and collections workflows.

The partnership enables enterprises to deploy multichannel voice agents across telephony and digital platforms. Real-time speech generation and intelligent workflow execution minimize response times, enhance operational efficiency, and maintain consistent brand voice quality – even during high-volume interactions. Through this collaboration, customers gain access to Cartesia’s full suite of enterprise-grade offerings, including flexibility with on-premise or cloud-hosted deployment options. The companies have developed a jointly tested deployment architecture tailored for regulated environments, with attention to latency management, audio handling, interruption control, fallback behaviour, and operational governance. The solution emphasises production readiness, monitoring, and observability to ensure reliability at enterprise scale.

Blue Machines’ Voice AI stack manages the end-to-end call lifecycle – from telephony connectivity and real-time audio streaming to dialogue orchestration and integrations with CRM, banking systems, messaging platforms, and internal APIs. Cartesia’s conversational AI model infrastructure is the first to enable ultra-low-latency speech processing for Indian languages, hyper-realistic voice generation, and streaming responses that allow smooth conversational flow, even during interruptions.

Select Examples of Enterprise Applications and Measured Results

BFSI – Multilingual collections and service: Banks can reduce collections operating costs by up to 45% while improving promise-to-pay conversion by 15-25% by deploying a collections voice agent. The agent engages customers in their preferred language, retrieves EMI and account details from backend systems, and provides immediate payment pathways – all within an India-resident processing environment that ensures regulatory compliance and eliminates manual follow-ups.

Healthcare – Appointment management and follow-ups:

Hospital networks can cut no-show rates by 25-40% and achieve 30-50% faster appointment confirmations by automating appointment confirmations, rescheduling, and patient reminders through low-latency, natural voice interactions. This frees staff to focus on high-value care delivery while maintaining governance standards for data processing of confidential patient information.

Enterprise customer support – High-volume inbound queries

Telecom and utility providers can increase Tier 1 query automation rates by 60-80% and drive down call center costs by 30-50% while boosting CSAT scores. This is achieved by deploying voice agents that authenticate customers, execute workflows in real time, and resolve billing queries, service requests, and plan changes in regional languages.

Arjun Desai, Co-Founder of Cartesia, said,

“Enterprises expect voice experiences that are fast, natural, and expressive, without compromising on control and reliability. Sonic 3 delivers ultra low latency, human quality speech across the top 9 Indic languages. We power millions of daily voice interactions for global customers including ServiceNow, Gupshup, and Magicbricks. We are thrilled to partner with Blue Machines and double down on our commitment to the Indian market through our new Bangalore office. As voice becomes the primary interface for Indian enterprises and consumers, we look forward to building that future alongside daring and innovative partners.”

Nirmit Parikh, Founder and CEO of Blue Machines AI, added,

“For Indian enterprises, compliance and regional language support are foundational. This partnership enables organisations to deploy India-resident, multilingual Voice AI workflows with the performance, governance, and scale required for regulated industries.”

Looking ahead, the companies plan to expand support for additional Indian languages, introduce new enterprise workflows, and closely partner on evaluation and model improvements. The collaboration aims to improve customer satisfaction, increase deployment speed, and deliver measurable business impact for enterprises adopting Voice AI.

PPDS, together with integration specialist Exaprobe and digital signage software partner, Telelogos, have combined their expertise to deliver unrivalled high quality, low energy visual performance and remote management capabilities to the Institut’s 3,000 plus staff, with a fleet of 20x sustainability conscious Philips Professional Displays.

 Amsterdam, Feb 20: PPDS, the exclusive global provider of Philips Professional Displays, is excited to announce that its Tableaux ePaper and 3000 Series EcoDesign digital signage displays have been selected to deliver a perfect tonic of high performance, low energy visual capabilities to Institut Pasteur’s 538,000 ft² biomedical research campus in Paris.

 Founded by Louis Pasteur in 1887, the Institut Pasteur is an internationally acclaimed not for profit research and education institute committed to the fight against infectious diseases in France and around the world. A recipient of 10 Nobel Prizes and employing over 3,000 staff, the Institut’s colossal five hectare campus features 39 separate buildings, including a conference centre, and a total of 48,000 m² of laboratory space.

 Future proofed planning

With such a vast campus and visual technology playing an increasingly important role in its day to day activities and communications, Institut Pasteur’s AV/IT management team sought to modernise its ageing display infrastructure. Concluding an extensive site review, the project would include a fleet of 20x dynamic displays, strategically placed to support a variety of needs, settings, and light environments, including reception halls, meeting rooms, laboratories, and more.

 The project presented a number unique challenges. As a site of historical significance – containing several listed buildings – retaining the aesthetics during any modernisation, while ensuring minimal disruptions to staff, was imperative. Furthermore, displays would need to meet the Institut Pasteur’s strict standards for electrical safety and durability, while providing greater energy efficiency to reduce its carbon footprint.

 Romain Gentile, Key Account Manager at PPDS, commented: “Performance, readability, and energy efficiency were all key, with the displays disseminating scientific, institutional, and logistical information. For Institut Pasteur, and the invaluable work they do, there can be absolutely no compromise.”

 Effective communication

Working with AV/IT integration specialists, Exaprobe, PPDS’ multi award winning ‘zero power’ 32” Philips Tableaux ePaper and 55” Philips Signage 3000 Series EcoDesign displays were immediately identified as the only solutions capable of meeting – and ultimately surpassing – the Institut’s high expectations.

 Signalling a new era of visual communications and sustainability, the introduction of Philips Tableaux ePaper displays was selected primarily – but not exclusively – to provide wayfinding information, such as mapping, campus information, and other instructions, to help visitors navigate around the site.

 Fully portable and able to be used entirely unplugged – ideal for use in Institut’s older buildings and in spaces with limited power sources – each Philips Tableaux is capable of displaying full colour, static imagery for days, weeks, months, or even years without using a single kilowatt of energy. The only time Philips Tableaux displays require power is during content updates, with one image change using just 0.0025 kWh.

 The Gold standard

For the institute’s more advanced and detailed visual needs on a grander scale, including for presentations, corporate videos, and other internal communications, the future proof Philips Signage 3000 Series EcoDesign was the standout choice, ticking all boxes for both performance and sustainability.

 In addition to delivering high impact 4K Ultra HD visual quality, with picture perfect performance down to the smallest detail – be that videos, pictures or numbers – the Philips Signage 3000 Series EcoDesign enables the screens to use less than 50 per cent of the power compared to other digital signage models in the market, without compromising on performance.   

 The Philips Signage 3000 Series EcoDesign display is also the industry’s first EPEAT Climate+ Gold certified display of its kind, which measures the social and environmental impacts of products from extraction to end of life. The Philips Signage 3000 EcoDesign meets the most demanding set of criteria for sustainability leadership in electronics.

 24/7 management

Both the Philips Tableaux and Philips Signage 3000 Series EcoDesign are also members of PPDS’ growing portfolio of integrated Android SoC displays, offering a vast range of features and benefits, including secure and seamless remote management capabilities with trusted partners.

 Enabling centralised management of the new fleet, PPDS partner, Telelogos’ Media4Display solution was selected and integrated, providing round-the-clock monitoring and management. This also allows the Pasteur technical team to schedule content in real time without having to travel or manually update, further reducing their carbon footprint and costs. 

 The full integration proceeded successfully and without disrupting research activities. Connectivity and content management tests were carried out on site, ensuring a seamless transition.

 Franck Fromet, AV Manager, Institut Pasteur, commented: “The integration of our new Philips Professional Displays has enabled us to modernise our communication while respecting our environmental commitment. The PPDS teams understood our constraints and proposed a solution that is understated, elegant, and effective.”

 Romain Gentile concluded: “The Institut Pasteur now benefits from a modern, sustainable display system that is fully adapted to its scientific environment. Information is disseminated more effectively, content is updated instantly, and energy consumption has been significantly reduced.”