TRO | Google Backs A24 With US$75 Million To Build AI Tools For Filmmakers

Plus, India Builds Towards Sovereign AI and Meta Enters The Prediction Market

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Meliora Company
June 29, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

 Subscribe | 29th June, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. Google Backs A24 With US$75 Million To Build AI Tools For Filmmakers

Google has invested US$75 million in independent film studio A24 as part of a multi-year AI research partnership, marking the first time Alphabet has taken a stake in a film studio. Google's DeepMind unit will work directly with A24's filmmakers to develop new workflows, tools, and techniques for production and distribution. The deal explicitly excludes access to A24's content library or data. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis described the partnership as a way to build AI tools that empower rather than replace artists, with A24's filmmakers shaping the technology from the ground up.

Here’s why this matters: Hollywood's relationship with AI has been defined by conflict: strikes, lawsuits, and licensing battles. This deal represents a different model, with a major AI lab investing in a studio not to access its content, but to collaborate with its artists in building tools they actually want to use. For the creative and media industries, this is an enormous distinction. The deal does not give Google access to A24's archive or data, which removes the most contentious element of previous AI-Hollywood partnerships. DeepMind working inside A24's production process gives it something arguably more valuable: direct feedback from some of the world's most respected filmmakers on which AI tools serve the creative process and which do not.

2. Mukesh Ambani Wants India To Build Its Own AI, And Reliance Will Lead It

Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani has outlined an ambitious AI strategy at the company's annual general meeting, declaring that India must become a creator, adopter, and global leader in AI rather than a consumer of technology built elsewhere. Reliance Intelligence, its newly formed AI division, will commission the first 120 megawatts of AI compute infrastructure in Jamnagar by end of 2026, with capacity scalable to more than 200,000 H100-equivalent GPUs, placing it among the world's largest AI compute platforms. The facility runs entirely on renewable energy from Reliance's solar farms in Kutch, and is partnered with both Google and Meta.

Here’s why this matters: The race to build sovereign AI infrastructure is no longer just a conversation between the US and China. India is now a serious third player, and Reliance is its most powerful vehicle. Ambani's framing, that India should not be a consumer of AI created elsewhere, is a direct challenge to the current global order in which frontier models, compute, and investment are concentrated in a handful of Western and Chinese companies. For the TMT industry, a platform of this scale serving hundreds of millions of Jio users, built on open-source models with Google and Meta as partners, could reshape AI adoption across one of the world's largest and fastest-growing digital economies.

3. Meta Enters The Prediction Market Race With ‘Arena’

Meta is developing a prediction markets app called Arena, confirmed as a top priority by Mark Zuckerberg. The standalone app would let users forecast the outcomes of political, sporting, and world events using a video game-style points system rather than real money, though real-money betting has not been ruled out for the future. Arena will use Meta's Llama AI to automatically generate questions from trending topics and is expected to funnel users from Facebook and Instagram.

Here’s why this matters: Prediction markets have moved from a niche financial instrument to one of the fastest-growing sectors in consumer technology. Monthly trading volume on Kalshi alone has grown from US$5 billion in September 2025 to US$24 billion in April 2026. Meta's entry is significant not because Arena is an original idea (the company tried and abandoned a similar product called Forecast in 2020) but because of the distribution it brings. Two billion Facebook and Instagram users as a potential funnel changes the scale of what prediction markets could become. For media and entertainment, a platform where audiences bet on outcomes across sport, politics, and culture is a new form of engagement that sits uncomfortably close to territory broadcasters have long called their own.

Introducing MvSE - The Meliora Ventures Signal Engine

Meliora Ventures Fund One has reached First Close, establishing Meliora Ventures as a dedicated investment platform focused on backing CTO-led founders building the next generation of Vertical AI, Generative AI and AI-enabled SaaS companies.

Alongside the new AI fund, we are launching MvSE - Meliora Ventures Signal Engine - our proprietary AI-powered venture intelligence platform.

MvSE tracks thousands of companies across multiple live data sources, transforming signal into conviction and helping us identify founders, opportunities and emerging market trends faster and more effectively.

Modern venture investing should be enhanced by technology, not constrained by traditional methods. The future belongs to those who build it.

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Our Pursuit Of Better

An AI inference chip start-up called Groq has raised US$650 million six months after Nvidia licensed its core chip technology and hired away its founder and CEO in a deal worth US$20 billion. With its original hardware IP now shared with Nvidia, Groq has pivoted to its inference cloud business, which now spans 13 data centres across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC, serving over five million developers and processing trillions of tokens weekly.

Melbourne-founded global payments platform, Airwallex, has raised US$320 million in Series H funding at an US$11 billion valuation, up from US$8 billion in December 2025. The raise will accelerate two new product launches: T:0, an AI-native platform that automates the full finance function of a business from day one, and Airi, a consumer wallet built for agentic commerce. Annualised revenue reached US$1.3 billion in March 2026, up 74% year on year.

General Intuition, a New York-based AI start-up, has raised US$320 million at a US$2.3 billion valuation led by Khosla Ventures, with Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt among the backers. The company trains AI agents on hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay from Medal, its sister platform, using human action data to teach models spatial reasoning, causality, and physical intuition. The same model powering its game agents is currently running a quadrupedal robot in its New York office.

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A race against time to deliver every point, every match, every court, live. Nearly half a million app installs, millions of video streams, and a team behind it all that became more like family.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.