From Polavaram to Quantum Valley: Naidu Highlights Andhra Pradesh’s 19-Month Achievements & Future Vision

Third Ministers and Secretaries conference:

• CM directs officials to maintain team spirit, adopt best practices to benefit society
• CM’s stress on revamping outdated Acts to ease rules and benefit people
• Officials asked to adopt technology for perfect execution of laws and for delivery of government services
• Amaravati to emerge as most livable city in three years: CM

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu advised the officials to maintain team spirit in an effective manner and adopt best practices to get good results and benefit the society. He said technology should be adopted and stressed the need for revamping of outdated Acts. He said the Government of India also considering to review the old Acts and remove unnecessary clauses to benefit the society. AP should be a role model in reviewing the Acts and in bringing reforms.

Addressing third Ministers and Secretaries conference at Secretariat here today, the Chief Minister said that the recent Davos World Economic Forum summit focused mainly on Artificial Intelligence and Energy transition as central points of discussions. Stressing the need for adopting new technology, the Chief Minister said that the state government is making efforts to adopt deep technology including AI, quantum computers and data centres to improve living standards of people.

The Chief Minister explained on the achievements of coalition government for the past 19 months balancing welfare and Development. He stated that he is very happy as Polavaram is nearing completion and start function before Goavari Pushkaram in 2027. Likewise Amaravati capital works gained momentum and will be completed in three years and Amaravati is sure to emerge as most livable city in three years. In addition the Visakha steel plant also put on track and earned Rs 54 crore profit. He said that the state government came to rescue of farmers by spending Rs 1100 crore through market intervention to get better price for agricultural produce. Likewise Rs 10000 cr credited into the accounts of farmers within 48 hours of procurement of paddy. He said distribution of pattadar pass books with government emblem started and the pass books will have QR code and tamper proof using blockchain technology. He said Rs 24000 crore spent towards development of irrigation sector.

The Chief Minister said foundation stone was laid for Quantum valley in Amaravati, Google and other companies are setting up Data centres in Visakhapatnam with a capacity of 5 gigawats. Green Ammonia project launched in Kakinada. With the introduction of reforms now the state government introducing trudown charges in power tariff. He said roads will be laid by spending Rs 3000 crore and state will be made garbage-free by March. He said drinking water facility will be provided to all houses under Jal Jeevan mission at a cost of Rs 25000 crore. He said Sanjeevani project under which the university health scheme will be implemented will become a game changer in health sector.

Earlier Deputy Chief Minister K Pawan Kalyan stressed the need for effective performance of officials at field level and to fill the gaps in delivery of government services. Chief Secretary K Vijayanand delivered inaugural address.

Pandorum Technologies Raises $18M in Series B to Advance Global Access to Programmable Tissue Regenerative Therapies

Pandorum Technologies, a biotechnology company pioneering programmable regenerative medicine, with operations in India and the United States, has announced the closing of a US$18 million in Series B financing round, to advance the clinical development of its disease-modifying, tunable, exosome-based therapies, including Kuragenx, while scaling global manufacturing and expanding operations across the U.S., Japan, and the Middle East.

The round was led by Protons Corporate, with participation from Galentic Pharma, marquee investor Ashish Kacholia, Noblevast Advisory and Avinya Fund, Burman Family and others. Bandana Kankani, advisor and investor at Pandorum, had guided the transaction, optimizing the alignment between the investment architecture and company’s value creation.

Founded by Tuhin Bhowmick and Arun Chandru, Pandorum’s proprietary platform combines biology, engineering, and computation to develop tunable, regenerative exosome therapies that reprogram pathological tissue states, like inflammation and fibrosis, toward functional recovery.

"Just like the Ship of Theseus, the human body is constantly being rebuilt. Pandorum focuses on restoring biological memory, redefining regenerative medicine at its core, “said Dr. Tuhin Bhowmick, Co-Founder and CEO of Pandorum. “Our approach treats tissue health, disease, and degeneration as a navigational challenge within an information-constrained biological landscape,” added Dr. Tuhin. “This funding would enable us to translate breakthrough science into programmable, disease-modifying therapies, beginning with single-tissue applications and scaling to multi-tissue repair, aligned with Pandorum’s vision- to heal fast and age slow.”

Congratulations to our team for this achievement. Regenerative medicine, particularly for corneal blindness, is a global necessity that knows no borders, said co-founder Arun Chandru.

The clinical translation efforts are led by globally recognized clinicians, including Dr. Virender Singh Sangwan (Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital, New Delhi), Dr. Shigeru Kinoshita (Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Kyoto), and Dr. Ramez Haddadin and Dr. Satish Nadig (Northwestern Medicine, Chicago).

Pandorum has implemented a globally distributed manufacturing strategy, including a CDMO partnership with AGC Biologics (Italy) for the U.S. and European markets, and a strategic collaboration with Nucelion Therapeutics (India), a subsidiary of Bharat Biotech, to support supply across the Asia-Pacific region. The company is also exploring potential partnerships in the Middle East.

Pandorum’s primary focus is on ocular surface diseases, such as Stevens–Johnson Syndrome and Neurotrophic Keratitis, for which Kuragenx has received U.S. FDA Orphan Drug Designation. In addition to ophthalmology, it is expanding its tunable platform to address systemic conditions, including inflammatory and degenerative diseases affecting the lung, liver, and nervous systems.

About Pandorum Technologies

Pandorum Technologies is a biotechnology company focused on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. The company operates research facilities in India, and the U.S. For more information, visit www.pandorum.com

Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures-backed Velocity Commits ₹100 Cr to Scale AI-Led Shipping, Targets 5X Growth in 2026

Velocity, India’s leading e-commerce enablement platform has announced a ₹100 crore investment to scale Velocity Shipping (formerly Shipfast), as it doubles down on advancing faster, more reliable and transparent AI-led logistics for digital-first brands. The investment will be deployed over the next 2 years and will be funded entirely through internal cash reserves and revenues from Velocity’s core businesses.

Since its launch in 2025, Velocity Shipping has seen strong adoption, with 900+ brands onboarded so far, with around 60% of these coming from Velocity’s existing ecosystem. The platform is currently witnessing 70% month-on-month growth in order volumes and now contributes nearly 40% of Velocity’s overall revenues. In December 2025 alone, Velocity Shipping processed over 10 lakh orders, placing Velocity among India’s top three shipping aggregators by order volume.

To support this momentum, the ₹100 crore investment will be directed toward strategic hiring, product development, and AI-led innovation across the logistics value-chain. Velocity plans to double its shipping team and has already made senior hires from NimbusPost, Pickrr, Delhivery and Shiprocket as it strengthens its shipping and last-mile capabilities. The company is also targeting a 5x increase in monthly shipping volumes in CY26.

“We started Velocity by solving one of the biggest bottlenecks for digital-first brands: access to capital. As we worked closely with thousands of founders, it became clear that logistics and fulfilment were equally critical constraints to growth, but existing solutions needed to evolve to better support digital-first brands. Velocity Shipping was built as a strong, operator-first alternative to existing shipping solutions, with reliability and accountability at its core,” said Abhiroop Medhekar, Co-Founder and CEO, Velocity.

“Its rapid adoption has reinforced our belief in shipping as a major growth engine for Velocity. This ₹100 crore commitment reflects our long-term conviction to double down on shipping as we build category-defining digital infrastructure for India's e-commerce ecosystem,” Medhekar added.

Logistics has become a Growth Bottleneck for D2C Brands

Rising consumer expectations around delivery speed have fundamentally reshaped how digital-first brands compete online. Faster Shipping directly impacts purchase completion, customer experience, delivery performance and repeat purchases. Yet brands were expected to deal with missed pickups, fake delivery attempts, slow escalations and delayed COD settlements -often shrugged off as ‘industry reality’.

This gap has tangible business consequences for D2C businesses, directly impacting growth and customer trust. According to the E-Commerce Trends Report 2025 by DHL eCommerce, 81% of shoppers abandon their carts if their preferred delivery option isn’t available.

Velocity Shipping was co-created with brands from Velocity’s own portfolio to address these challenges through a tech-first, transparent approach to logistics.

How Velocity Shipping fills the gap

Velocity Shipping enables same-day, next-day, express and standard deliveries helping brands meet rising consumer expectations without adding operational complexity. The platform works with multiple third-party logistics (3PL) partners, including Delhivery, Ekart, Amazon, Blue Dart, Blitz, Pikndel and XpressBees, allowing brands to access the best-performing courier networks across regions through a single interface and and serves over 19,000 pincodes pan-India.

A central differentiation in how the platform solves long-standing inefficiencies across the shipping lifecycle is its AI-powered intervention layer, which operates across the entire order journey. The system validates addresses, uses local-language voice agents (Vani AI developed by Velocity’s in-house tech team) to urge the conversion of COD orders to prepaid, and automatically verifies non-delivery reports. When a shipment is marked as an NDR or RTO, the system automatically triggers an AI call to the customer to verify the issue, helping identify false delivery attempts or premature returns.

AI-led calling helps solve failed deliveries and reduce RTO’s

Orders verified via WhatsApp and AI-led calls are delivered at 1.85x the rate of unverified orders, based on over 2.4 lakh AI-assisted verification calls completed on the platform. This proactive intervention with the platform has achieved 60-70% recovery of failed deliveries where the buyer is still interested and a 8-10 percentage point reduction in return-to-origin rates, directly impacting both customer experience and brand profitability for digital-first brands.

Velocity Shipping also tackles one of the biggest pain points in logistics for digital-first businesses: transparency and opacity in shipping aggregation models. In traditional models, weight discrepancies raised by courier partners often result in automatic deductions, with brands left to reconcile charges later. Velocity Shipping reverses this approach. Billing adjustments are made only after an AI-led verification of sorter images supplied by the courier partners, ensuring discrepancies are reviewed, validated, and resolved transparently.

Founded in 2020, Velocity has evolved into a full-stack growth enablement platform for digital-first brands across capital, logistics, insights and AI-led solutions. Its financing business is expected to turn profitable in CY26.

About Velocity

Velocity is India’s leading e-commerce enablement platform, empowering digital-first businesses with fast, flexible non-dilutive capital, logistics, and AI-powered tools to scale efficiently. Founded in 2020 by IIT Bombay alumni Abhiroop Medhekar, Atul Khichariya, and Saurav Swaroop, Velocity’s mission is to accelerate the growth of India’s e-commerce ecosystem.

Backed by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, Velocity has raised $30+ Million so far and has partnered with 4,000+ D2C and digital-first brands, disbursing over ₹1,100 crore in funding. Beyond capital, the company offers a comprehensive suite of products—Velocity Shipping for AI-driven shipping and logistics, Velocity Insights for actionable business intelligence and Vani AI, an AI-powered telecalling solution for personalized customer engagement. Some of the leading D2C brands Velocity has supported include Frido, Bellavita, Koskii, Bewakoof, Soulflower, Rynox Gears, NasherMiles, Hammer, Zlade, The Bear House, Off Duty, and Chumbak.

For more information, visit: https://www.velocity.in/

India Hosts Nokia’s Biggest Fixed Broadband Research Facility in Chennai

Nokia has just inaugurated its largest fixed networks R&D facility globally in SIPCOT Siruseri, Chennai, Tamil Nadu. This marks a major expansion of the Finnish telecom giant’s footprint in India.

• Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu
• Investment: ₹270 crore in the first phase, with plans to expand to ₹300 crore
• Focus Areas:
  • Next-gen broadband technologies (10G, 25G, 50G, 100G PON)
  • Fixed wireless access
  • Wi-Fi and multi-dwelling unit (MDU) solutions
  • AI-driven automation and cloud-based network controllers
• Jobs Created: Over 200 high-end positions in advanced telecom R&D
• Government Partnership: Expansion follows an MoU signed with the Tamil Nadu government during CM M.K. Stalin’s U.S. visit in August 2024

Why This Matters

• Strengthens India’s role as a global hub for telecom innovation
• Reinforces Tamil Nadu’s leadership in high-tech manufacturing and R&D
• Positions Nokia to drive advancements in ultra-fast broadband and AI-powered network solutions worldwide

India Energy Stack v0.3: One-stop digital platform for electricity data

The Ministry of Power has rolled out Version 0.3 of the India Energy Stack (IES), marking a significant step in building a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for India’s electricity sector.

For an uninitiated, the India Energy Stack (IES) is a government-led initiative to build a digital public infrastructure for India’s power sector. Think of it as the "UPI for energy" — a unified, secure, and interoperable digital backbone that allows all stakeholders in the electricity ecosystem to exchange data and interact seamlessly.

Here’s a clear breakdown of what Version 0.3 of IES means:

Key Highlights of IES v0.3

• Unified Digital Framework: Designed to standardize and unify electricity data across utilities, system operators, market participants, innovators, and consumers.
• Secure & Interoperable Exchange: Enables seamless, secure data sharing through standardized protocols and shared data models.
• Consumer Empowerment: Aims to give both consumers and prosumers (those who produce and consume electricity, e.g., rooftop solar owners) more control and visibility into their energy usage.
• National Rollout Goal: The framework is being refined and tested, with a target for full-scale national deployment by 2026.
• Transparency & Efficiency: Expected to improve coordination across the energy ecosystem, reduce inefficiencies, and foster innovation in energy services.

Why It Matters

• For Consumers: Easier access to consumption data, better billing transparency, and potential for personalized energy services.
• For Innovators & Startups: A standardized data backbone opens opportunities for new apps, analytics, and smart energy solutions.
• For Policy & Governance: Strengthens India’s push toward digital public infrastructure, aligning with initiatives like India Stack in finance and health.
• For Sustainability: Facilitates integration of renewable energy sources by improving grid visibility and balancing supply-demand more effectively.

The India Energy Stack project is scheduled for completion by July 2026, with phased national adoption expected to strengthen digital coordination across India’s power sector.