AI Roundup: April 4, 2026

1. Sarvam AI Nears $300-350M Round at $1.5B Valuation

Sarvam AI. India’s Sarvam AI is closing a $300-350M round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from NVIDIA, Amazon, and Prosperity7, making it the largest private funding round for an Indian AI startup. The Bangalore-based company builds voice-first AI systems supporting 22 Indian languages, addressing a market where most global LLMs underperform on Indic language tasks. Source

2. Galaxea AI Raises $290.4M Series B+ for Embodied AI and Robotics

Galaxea AI. Beijing-based Galaxea AI raised $290.4M in a Series B+ round from nearly 20 investors, pushing its valuation above 20 billion yuan. The company builds Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and robotic systems targeting manufacturing, logistics, and commercial services, joining a growing wave of Chinese embodied AI startups attracting significant capital. Source

3. MLCommons Releases MLPerf Inference v6.0 with New Video and Recommendation Benchmarks

MLCommons. MLPerf Inference v6.0 landed as the most significant revision of the benchmark suite to date, adding tests for text-to-video (Wan2.2), GPT-OSS 120B, DLRMv3 recommendation, and YOLOv11 edge detection. 24 organizations submitted results. AMD’s MI355X hit 1M+ tokens per second at cluster scale, while NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra topped throughput rankings, signaling that inference performance competition is intensifying across hardware vendors. Source

4. Tennessee Signs AI Mental Health Chatbot Safety Bill with Private Right of Action

Tennessee. Governor Bill Lee signed SB 1580, prohibiting AI systems from representing themselves as qualified mental health professionals. The bill passed unanimously (Senate 32-0, House 94-0) and takes effect July 1, 2026. Tennessee joins Oregon and Washington in passing chatbot safety legislation as part of a broader wave of 78 chatbot safety bills active across 27 states, six weeks into the 2026 legislative season. Source

5. Cognichip Raises $60M to Let AI Design the Chips That Power AI

Cognichip. The semiconductor design startup raised $60M in a Series A led by Seligman Ventures, with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joining the board. Cognichip builds physics-informed AI tools that promise to cut chip development costs by 75% and timelines by half. The company is already working with over 30 semiconductor firms, targeting a key bottleneck in the AI supply chain. Source

6. Anthropic Testing “Conway” Always-On Agent Platform

Anthropic. Reports surfaced that Anthropic is testing “Conway,” a persistent agent platform that turns Claude into an always-on digital assistant with extensions, webhooks, and Chrome browser automation. Conway agents can be awakened by external events and autonomously execute multi-step tasks, representing a shift from reactive chat interfaces toward proactive, event-driven AI assistants. Source

7. LiveCodeBench April Update: Gemini 3 Models Take Top Two Spots

LiveCodeBench. The April 3 LiveCodeBench coding benchmark update placed Gemini 3 Pro Preview at 91.7% (first) and Gemini 3 Flash Preview at 90.8% (second), with DeepSeek V3.2 Speciale at 89.6% in third. The results highlight that coding benchmarks continue to see rapid gains, with the top three models all scoring above 89% on competitive programming tasks. Source