Industry

APR enters India after U.S., Japan and Europe, with different strategies by country in focus

APR is accelerating its overseas expansion by entering India after the United States, Japan and Europe. It has begun selling Medicube products through a strategic partnership with Indian beauty platform Nykaa, using a B2B-led strategy similar to Europe. In the U.S. and Japan, APR prioritised direct online sales and later added B2B distribution. The company is also prioritising skincare over devices in India, citing climate and regulatory considerations.

AI & Enterprise

Mistral takes on OpenAI, Anthropic with custom enterprise AI platform Forge

French AI startup Mistral has unveiled Forge, a platform for building bespoke AI models for enterprises, TechCrunch reported. Announced at Nvidia's annual GTC conference, the platform lets organisations train models from scratch using their own data, going beyond fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented generation approaches. Mistral said Forge can better handle non-English or specialised data and support agent systems using reinforcement learning. It also aims to reduce reliance on third-party model providers.