– Two former SoftBank Vision Fund investment professionals join SBVA, expanding its global network across the U.S., Japan, and Southeast Asia
– SBVA to deepen support for portfolio companies, from identifying promising companies globally to supporting their expansion into overseas markets

SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 26, 2026 — SBVA (CEO: JP Lee) announced today that it has appointed two former SoftBank Vision Fund investment professionals, Kaz Yoshimaru and Chris Lee, as Venture Partners. The appointments will further strengthen SBVA’s global investment capabilities and expand its support for portfolio companies entering overseas markets and growing their businesses.

Kaz Yoshimaru holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from the University of Tokyo, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School. He joined SoftBank Group in 2015 and later served as an Investment Director at SoftBank Vision Fund, investing in global technology companies as part of its U.S. investment team. He invested in leading technology companies including Databricks, Wiz, Perplexity, and Sierra, while supporting their expansion into Japan and helping bridge Silicon Valley and Asia.

As a Venture Partner at SBVA, Yoshimaru will leverage his expertise and network across the U.S. technology and venture ecosystem to support a range of initiatives. He will also lead strategic advisory and structuring efforts for a new fund focused on investing in U.S. startups.

Chris Lee earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Chicago. He later worked at CVC Capital Partners and GIC before serving as a Partner at SoftBank Vision Fund. With extensive experience in private equity and growth equity, Lee led investments in major high-growth companies across Asia, including Yanolja, Carro, Advance Intelligence Group, bKash, IYUNO, and Funding Societies, building deep investment expertise and networks across the region.

At SBVA, Chris Lee will help identify co-investment opportunities in Southeast Asia and support new fund formation, while also helping portfolio companies enter and expand in local markets.

“Kaz and Chris bring extensive investment experience and networks built through identifying and supporting innovative companies across global markets,” said JP Lee, CEO of SBVA. “We expect their addition to further strengthen SBVA’s role as a bridge between the global technology ecosystem and Asian markets.”

SOURCE SBVA

NEW YORK, Aug. 26, 2026 — Chronograph, leading global provider of portfolio monitoring, valuations, and analytics technology for private capital investors, announced a partnership with Perplexity to bring clients’ trusted Chronograph data into Perplexity’s answer engine, and its agent platform, Perplexity Computer. The integration enables private capital professionals to query their validated, auditable portfolio data in plain language within Perplexity, alongside the licensed research sources their teams already rely on.

As institutional investors increasingly adopt AI to accelerate research, valuation, and reporting, the importance of a well-governed data foundation only grows. Chronograph is now available among Perplexity’s new Licensed Finance Data Sources, bringing the most trusted private capital data to one of the most widely adopted AI research surfaces in a single workflow.

Through the connector, teams can pull validated portfolio data straight from Chronograph to drive analytics, generate reporting, and leverage advanced AI to create finished work, built against a trusted data foundation. Reported figures trace back to their source documents, so teams doing mission-critical work always know which data set produced which number.

“Private markets intelligence has traditionally been difficult to access and even harder to put to work,” said Jeff Grimes, Head of Live Events Products, Perplexity. “By bringing Chronograph’s institutional-quality data into Perplexity Finance, we’re giving investors a faster, more intuitive way to research private markets, compare opportunities, and turn complex information into decision-ready insight.”

“For 10 years we have worked to integrate trusted private capital data directly into investor workflows,” said Divya Odayappan, Product Lead, Chronograph LP. “With the launch of Perplexity Computer, it was only natural to partner to unlock Chronograph data within it. The value of Chronograph’s connector goes beyond speed and accessibility; an analyst can be confident when querying portfolio data and analyzing investments in Perplexity. This is key for an industry where trust and accuracy are everything.”

The Chronograph connector for Perplexity is now available to Chronograph clients with an eligible Perplexity Pro, Max, or Enterprise subscription. Customers authenticate their own entitlements; there is no separate data contract to negotiate. Please reach out to Chronograph at [email protected] for more information.

About Chronograph

Chronograph was founded in 2016 to bring trust and efficiency to private capital markets data. The firm’s products help institutional limited partners and general partners — including many of the world’s largest private equity and private credit investors — streamline and automate portfolio monitoring, valuations, analytics, and reporting. The firm is backed by Sixth Street, Summit Partners, Carlyle AlpInvest, and Nasdaq, Inc. with offices in Brooklyn, NY and London, UK. For further information, visit www.chronograph.pe, and follow Chronograph on LinkedIn.

Contact
Fred Bower, Head of Marketing
Chronograph
New York, New York
[email protected]

SOURCE Chronograph

OliverAI today announced pre-seed funding from Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures to scale OliverDB, its high-performance analytical data platform purpose-built for agentic AI.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26, 2026 — Today’s enterprise analytics infrastructure wasn’t built for agentic AI. Unlike humans, AI agents create continuous, unpredictable, machine-speed analytical workloads, which existing systems weren’t designed to handle. As AI deployments scale, infrastructure can become both a performance bottleneck and a cost problem—limiting how quickly agents can work, while driving compute consumption up faster than the value they create. That puts the performance and promised ROI of enterprise AI at risk.

OliverDB is designed for this new reality. Its analytical engine enables AI agents to investigate enterprise data in real time while using a fraction of the compute required by existing systems. In tests using query shapes from ClickBench, the open-source analytical database benchmark developed by ClickHouse, Oliver ran hundreds of times faster than ClickHouse on CPUs and thousands of times faster with GPU execution.*

“This is not a 25% or 50% improvement to existing analytics infrastructure. It’s a complete step change,” said Praneet Sharma, co-founder of OliverAI. “A multi-petabyte analytics environment which requires thousands of servers today can collapse down to just a couple of servers—or even a single GPU—on Oliver, while simultaneously delivering dramatically faster performance. That changes what AI agents can do, how quickly they can do it, and the economics of operating them at enterprise scale.”

“Snowflake and Databricks helped define new categories of data infrastructure for the cloud era,” said Tim Tully, partner at Menlo Ventures. “Agentic AI represents another fundamental shift. Oliver represents a new kind of infrastructure designed specifically for the needs of agentic AI—combining the performance, efficiency, and control enterprises need to deploy AI agents at scale.”

Govern and observe agents without constraining them

Performance alone is not enough. Enterprises also need precise control over which systems agents can access, what information they can use, and which actions they can take.

OliverDB provides agent observability and governance across enterprise databases and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Enterprises can define policies for each agent, limit its available data and actions, and maintain an attributable record of every interaction—giving agents room to operate while keeping every action within policy.

“The challenge in enterprise AI is no longer simply whether a model is capable enough,” said John Vrionis, founder at Unusual Ventures. “The challenge is giving AI systems meaningful access to valuable enterprise data without sacrificing control, reliability, or trust. Oliver combines the performance, governance, and grounded intelligence required to deploy those systems in the real world.”

Better outputs with fewer tokens.

Oliver’s model swarm is designed to produce deeper, more reliable outputs while lowering token spend and reducing dependence on expensive frontier models. Instead of relying on one model to generate a single answer, Oliver runs many smaller, specialized models in parallel to test competing hypotheses, examine alternative explanations, and build on useful findings from prior investigations. A conductor model weighs the results and returns the conclusion best supported by the available data—or no conclusion when the data is insufficient. This gives enterprises more thorough analysis while reserving frontier models for work that actually requires them.

OliverDB is available today for enterprise deployments, either as a managed service or inside a customer’s VPC. Enterprises can test the platform against their own demanding analytical workloads, using their own data and queries, to measure its performance and infrastructure impact directly.

Learn more and start using Oliver today, at oliverdb.ai.

*Benchmark results are based on internal Oliver testing using ClickBench analytical workloads against ClickHouse 24.8. Results are workload- and configuration-dependent and have not been independently audited. View the complete methodology, configurations, and results.

For media or general inquiries: [email protected]

SOURCE Oliver AI, Inc.

Funding accelerates development of Teragen’s next-generation fuel cell technology to meet surging power demand

BOSTON, Aug. 26, 2026 — Teragen Energy, an advanced fuel cell company building modular power solutions for data centers, industrial sites, and utilities, today announced the close of an oversubscribed $6 million pre-seed funding round. The round was co-led by BEVC and Energy Capital Ventures^®, with participation from AP Ventures, AIC Ventures, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), and UntroD Capital Asia. This funding will advance Teragen Energy’s fuel cell technology from prototypes toward its first commercial pilot projects.

Reliable, abundant, cleaner energy is critical for this decade’s defining industries: artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, electric mobility. While grid operators race to meet rapid demand growth in these critical sectors, onsite power generation offers an alternative path. Unfortunately, today’s onsite power solutions come with high costs, high emissions, large footprints, and limited flexibility.

Teragen Energy elevates onsite power performance through a novel solid oxide fuel cell architecture, co-invented by CEO Dr. Ruofan Wang at Berkeley Lab. This innovation provides a path to best-in-class cost, efficiency, power density, and responsiveness for distributed power applications. Additionally, Teragen Energy’s technology is fuel-flexible, produces near-zero local pollutants, and can be optionally configured for energy storage or carbon capture.

“Today’s society runs on electricity, and tomorrow’s even more so,” said Dr. Ruofan Wang, CEO of Teragen Energy. “By redefining what a fuel cell can do, Teragen Energy can drive down both electricity costs and emissions without sacrificing reliability.”

“Teragen Energy’s next-generation fuel cell technology holds promise to play a key role in addressing the energy trilemma, offering a lower carbon, reliable, dynamic power solution with compelling economics,” said Joshua James, Investor at BEVC.

Victor Pascucci III, Managing General Partner at Energy Capital Ventures^® said, “The natural gas industry is the backbone of the energy expansion. The industry needs more modular and scalable technology to provide the clean, safe, reliable, cost-effective energy of the future. Teragen’s next generation fuel cells are vital to the future of energy and the energy expansion.” 

The funding announced today enables Teragen Energy to expand its testing and manufacturing infrastructure, grow its engineering team, scale up its core technology, and accelerate commercialization with data center, industrial, and utility partners.

About Teragen Energy
Teragen Energy builds advanced fuel cell systems that deliver reliable, affordable, and clean power to data centers, industrial sites, and utilities. Founded on Berkeley Lab innovations, Teragen Energy fuel cells excel on the metrics that matter most to customers: cost, efficiency, power density and responsiveness.

For more information, please visit www.teragenenergy.com.

Media Contact
Emerson Reiter, Teragen Energy
[email protected]

SOURCE Teragen Energy

Latest expansion strengthens NewPower’s ability to invest in inventory, respond to market opportunities, and support customers worldwide.

NASHUA, N.H., Aug. 26, 2026 — NewPower Worldwide, one of the electronics industry’s fastest-growing distributors, today announced it has expanded its committed credit facility to $750 million, further enhancing its ability to invest in inventory, support customer growth, and capitalize on opportunities across the global supply chain.

The increase follows a period of exceptional growth for NewPower Worldwide. Since its founding in 2014, the company has rapidly expanded its global footprint, growing to 14 offices across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, with $5 billion in annual sales, and managing more than $1 billion in inventory worldwide. The expanded facility provides additional financial capacity to support continued growth and evolving customer requirements.

In today’s rapidly changing supply chain environment, financial strength and access to capital play a critical role in securing inventory and maintaining continuity of supply. The expanded facility enhances NewPower’s ability to purchase strategically, support large-scale customer requirements, and provide greater flexibility around inventory and delivery programs.

“Our customers rely on NewPower to solve supply chain challenges quickly and at scale,” said Carleton Dufoe, Chief Executive Officer of NewPower Worldwide. “Expanding our credit facility to $750 million gives us additional capacity to secure inventory, support larger strategic programs, and respond faster when opportunities arise across the market. It further strengthens our ability to deliver solutions that help customers succeed in any market environment.”

The expanded facility strengthens NewPower’s ability to support larger and more complex customer programs while increasing the volume and scale of transactions the company can execute globally. By increasing its purchasing capacity, NewPower is better positioned to secure strategic inventory, capitalize on market opportunities, and deliver supply solutions to customers with greater speed, flexibility, and scale.

“Our expanded partnership with NewPower reflects our confidence in the company as it executes on behalf of its clients,” said Jason Upham, Senior Vice President at Citizens. “Our banking team led an increased credit facility designed to support NewPower’s goals and growth objectives.”

The expanded facility reflects NewPower’s continued financial strength and enhances its ability to convert market opportunities into tangible supply solutions for customers worldwide. Combined with the company’s global sourcing network and supply chain expertise, the added capacity positions NewPower to execute larger programs, secure critical inventory, and help customers respond to changing market conditions with speed, flexibility, and confidence.

About NewPower Worldwide

NewPower Worldwide is a leading independent distributor of electronic components and finished goods, serving OEMs, EMS providers, and supply chain partners worldwide. Privately owned and headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, the company is recognized for its advanced sourcing technology, global reach, and commitment to solving complex supply chain challenges. For more information, visit NewPower Worldwide.

SOURCE NewPower Worldwide

Funding led by Costanoa and joined by CVS Health Ventures and Flare Capital Partners

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26, 2026 — Onos Health, the behavioral health clinical intelligence platform for payers today announced a $17 million Series A financing round led by Costanoa, with participation from Flare Capital Partners and strategic investment from CVS Health Ventures. The financing follows strong commercial momentum, with leading U.S. health plans, including Aetna, leveraging Onos’ AI platform to improve behavioral health outcomes while driving affordability through lower total cost of care.

Behavioral health has become one of the most pressing challenges facing the U.S. healthcare system. More than 23% of U.S. adults experience a mental health condition annually, while direct medical costs for behavioral health exceed $140 billion each year. Despite the scale of spending, health plans often lack the data systems and clinical visibility to manage quality across their populations, which forces plans into reactive oversight that can be abrasive to members and result in delays to care.

“Behavioral health care quality is difficult to understand and manage because it is recorded in unstructured clinical documentation which legacy solutions cannot process,” said Akshay Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Onos Health. “AI has the potential to fundamentally transform how health plans manage care by making clinical quality and care pathways measurable at scale. Onos leverages proprietary AI to give plans unprecedented visibility into their populations, enabling them to proactively partner with providers, eliminate manual administrative work, and improve outcomes while driving efficiency across the healthcare system.”

Onos Health built the largest behavioral health care quality database to develop its AI platform, and partnered with leading health plans and industry medical leaders to build proprietary models to handle the immense complexity of behavioral health diagnoses and service lines. The result is a new platform capability deployed across national and regional health plans to solve some of behavioral health’s biggest challenges:

• 35% improvement in clinical standard adherence
• 75% improvement in clinical review efficiency resulting in fewer delays in care
• >6% reduction in behavioral health program costs within 12 months through improved clinical quality

“Behavioral health populations are often complex and require dedicated focus and coordination with health care providers to improve outcomes and affordability,” said Alyssa Reisner, Vice President and General Partner, CVS Health Ventures. “Onos Health helps surface actionable clinical insights from data that has historically been difficult to interpret. It provides a clearer understanding of treatment patterns and quality of care and supports more informed decision-making and collaboration with behavioral health care providers.”

Onos’ AI platform integrates claims, utilization and clinical documentation with quality guidelines to provide an actionable view of care pathways across populations. By analyzing both structured and unstructured data, the platform helps identify care patterns, treatment gaps, and areas for quality improvement. The platform demonstrates that more than 70% of behavioral health care quality signals are embedded in unstructured documentation, which Onos transforms into actionable clinical intelligence. These insights enable health plans to proactively collaborate with their provider networks to guide members toward the highest-quality, most cost-effective care options.    

“Behavioral health is one of the largest and least understood categories in healthcare, representing billions of dollars in spend and enormous variation in care costs with low correlation to care quality,” said Amy Cheetham, Partner at Costanoa. “The Onos team understands firsthand the operational challenges health plans face, and they are building critical foundational infrastructure for behavioral health care that has been historically overlooked.”

“Onos is giving health plans the behavioral health clinical intelligence they need to move from reactive oversight to value-driven healthcare,” said Margaret Malone, Partner at Flare Capital Partners. “Health plans using Onos’ AI-powered platform are seeing significant improvement in clinical quality and affordability, and we are excited to partner with Akshay and the team as they build the category”

About Onos Health

Onos Health is the behavioral health clinical intelligence platform that leverages proprietary AI to maximize health outcomes and affordability. Onos brings clarity to care quality and utilization, so payers can proactively partner with providers to identify the optimal care pathways for members and deliver the best possible outcomes across their populations. Built using the largest behavioral health quality database and trusted by 3 of the 6 largest health plans in the country, Onos enables a more collaborative and proactive approach for health plans and providers to achieve their health outcome goals. 

SOURCE Onos Health Inc. / BAM Agency

As the first and only autonomous coding platform across 23+ specialties and every health system care setting, Arintra is setting a new standard for revenue cycle management and reinventing how leading health systems like UC Davis Health, Mercyhealth, Meritus Health, Rochester Regional Health, Reid Health, Mercy Medical Center, and more get paid accurately, promptly, and in full

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26, 2026 — Arintra, the first and only enterprise AI platform for revenue assurance in healthcare, today announced a $25 million Series B funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $51 million. The round is led by Define Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Peak XV Partners, Yale New Haven Health (YNHH) Center for Health Care Innovation, Endeavor Health Ventures, Y Combinator, Counterpart Ventures, Ten13, and Spider Capital. Endeavor Health, based in Chicagoland, also was an early adopter of the technology, and participated in both the Series A and B rounds.

U.S. healthcare is a $5 trillion system, yet most health systems and provider groups struggle to get paid by payers for the care they deliver — predominantly due to siloed processes that are riddled with inaccuracy, costing health systems, providers, and patients every day. As a longtime function within health system operations, traditional revenue cycle management has consisted of individual point solutions and a fragmented workflow that leaves revenue on the table. Arintra is pioneering revenue assurance, an agentic AI approach built to close the gap between care delivered and revenue earned. The company’s platform has become a core piece of the enterprise health system’s infrastructure, bringing leading health systems the bottom-line impact they deserve.

Driving $5 billion in annual claim value for leading health systems, large provider groups, and academic medical centers
Arintra has deployed its platform across health systems and large provider groups, partnering directly with them to increase compliant revenue capture and lower cost to collect, reduce claim denials and processing lags, and improve coding accuracy. One of those partners is Rochester Regional Health. “At Rochester Regional Health, our vision extends beyond automating a single specialty — we’re looking at how AI can fundamentally transform coding across the enterprise,” said Karen Linder, Senior Director of Health Information Management & Coding at Rochester Regional Health. “We chose Arintra because of the breadth of its platform, its ability to support multiple specialties, and its proven experience with complex health systems. We began with a high-volume specialty, where we’ve already seen meaningful results, and are now expanding into additional areas. What’s most compelling is the opportunity to bring greater automation, consistency, and efficiency to coding at scale while giving our teams the transparency and control they need.”

Arintra also serves large academic medical centers, where the bar for explainability is especially high, including UC Davis Health. “The future of medical coding is not about replacing coders with AI (Autonomous Coding); it’s about equipping them with tools that enable them to work at the top of their expertise,” said Tami McMasters Gomez, Executive Director, Mid-Revenue Cycle at UC Davis Health. “As healthcare organizations continue to navigate a nationwide shortage of coding professionals, AI offers an opportunity to scale operations, improve productivity, and reduce administrative burden. Equally important is ensuring that AI operates in a transparent and accountable manner. The ability to view a complete audit trail and understand the rationale behind coding recommendations directly within the EHR allows coding professionals to validate decisions efficiently and confidently. This combination of human expertise, explainable AI, and streamlined workflows has enabled our teams to audit results approximately 50% faster than traditional manual processes while preserving coding quality, compliance, and clinical integrity.”

The first to automate coding, CDI, and denials in one unified agentic platform
Arintra’s revenue assurance platform is the first of its kind, combining cutting-edge AI with deep clinical expertise. The platform is grounded in medical coding, the foundation of revenue assurance and the one place every provider dollar flows through — and unifies all revenue cycle management across American health systems, becoming the enterprise standard in revenue assurance. Key features of the platform include:

• Comprehensive care setting coverage — Coverage of key health system care settings, including ambulatory, emergency, diagnostic, and inpatient;
• Growing specialty support — 23+ specialties across these four care settings, such as emergency department, hospitalist, radiology, primary care, internal / family medicine, urgent care, and more — and adding approximately two specialties per quarter; 
• Value across the revenue cycle — Agentic AI codes every chart autonomously and extends that intelligence across the revenue cycle, from Clinical Documentation Intelligence (CDI), denial appeals, payer insights, DRG validation, and more;
• The first EHR-embedded audit trail — Justification of the codes that it generates, improving audit readiness and appeals compliance while seamlessly incorporating existing provider and revenue cycle team workflows within the EHR.

Today, Arintra processes more than $5 billion in annual claim value for leading healthcare enterprises representing over $50 billion in combined net patient revenue, all of them trusting the platform to help them get paid accurately and fairly. Arintra’s approach empowers health systems with a 5.1% increase in compliant revenue capture, 32% reduction in cost, and 43% decrease in coding-related denials. The platform is available in the Epic Toolbox and on the athenahealth Marketplace; it received an A+ performance rating in a 2026 KLAS Emerging Company Spotlight report. 

Revenue assurance at scale amidst a changing reality for health systems
As financial pressures continue to increase within American health systems and the resources that keep revenue flowing — physicians and certified coders — remain constrained, getting paid accurately has become a strategic and financial imperative for health systems across the country. “Revenue cycle management is an essential part of the modern health system, one that is only becoming more important as many face immense financial, labor, and revenue challenges,” said Chirag Shah, Partner at Define Ventures. “Though many have tried, no solution to date has been comprehensive and strategic enough to provide health systems with the bottom-line impact they need — until Arintra. We believe Arintra has cemented itself as an indispensable piece of the enterprise health system’s infrastructure, and are proud to support them as they continue to bring this technology to more health systems across the country.”

With this Series B round, Arintra will invest in expanding across more enterprise health systems, deepen its clinical and specialty coverage, and extend the platform to new areas of the revenue cycle. “Every year, U.S. health systems fail to collect billions of dollars for care they’ve already delivered, not because of the quality of care but because the systems meant to capture that value are fragmented, manual, and error-prone,” said Nitesh Shroff, Co-founder and CEO of Arintra. “We are the only company that has built agentic coding intelligence that cascades across the entire revenue cycle, not point solutions bolted together. As financial pressure on health systems continues to mount, revenue assurance isn’t optional anymore. It’s how health systems build a financial foundation that matches the quality of care they deliver.”

About Arintra
Arintra is an enterprise AI platform for revenue assurance in healthcare, empowering health systems to get paid accurately, promptly, and fairly. Combining agentic AI with deep clinical expertise, Arintra autonomously codes every chart, explainably, across 23+ specialties and every care setting a health system operates — then cascades that intelligence across the revenue cycle through documentation intelligence (CDI) and denial appeals. Leading enterprise health systems including UC Davis Health, Mercyhealth, Meritus Health, Rochester Regional Health, Reid Health, Mercy Medical Center, and more use Arintra as their centralized, audit-ready revenue cycle platform. Arintra is available in the Epic Toolbox and on the athenahealth Marketplace, is HITRUST e1 certified, and earned a 93/100 with A+ performance rating from KLAS Research.

Claire Schillings
[email protected]

SOURCE Arintra

LOS ANGELES, August 26, 2026 — PATH, the premium purified-water brand in reusable aluminum bottles, announced today the close of a funding round of an undisclosed amount backed by a group of investors, including Agility’s corporate venture arm, Agility Ventures.

The funding will accelerate PATH’s expansion across the United States and international markets, strengthen brand investment, and support continued product and operational innovation.

“This investment marks an important step in PATH’s global expansion,” said Shadi Bakour, CEO of PATH. “We’re building a brand that travels across borders, retail formats, and consumer segments. The momentum we’ve built in the U.S. is just the beginning, and this round gives us the capital and confidence to accelerate our international ambitions and bring PATH to consumers around the world.”

Scaling a Global Platform

PATH continues to gain momentum across national retail, e-commerce, and strategic partnerships, with accelerating velocity in key accounts and increasing consumer demand.

Proceeds from the round will support:

• Rapid expansion of U.S. and international distribution
• Increased brand investment and consumer awareness
• Continued product innovation
• Further optimization of the supply chain and operations

Positioned for Strategic Growth

PATH is positioning itself for long-term opportunities with leading global beverage and consumer companies through expanded distribution, strong brand positioning, and increased strategic relevance.

The company is preparing for its next phase of growth, supported by strong fundamentals and developing interest from both institutional and strategic investors. Advisory support from Jordan Bray and Griffin Joseph with JG Partners focuses on laying the foundation for PATH’s scaled growth and success.

About PATH

PATH is a premium bottled water brand on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic. Packaged in sleek, reusable aluminium bottles, PATH offers purified water for modern consumers seeking both sustainability and convenience. The brand is available nationwide across major retailers, hospitality venues, and direct-to-consumer channels. More information at drinkpathwater.com.

SOURCE PATH

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 26, 2026 — Scrum Ventures, a San Francisco and Tokyo-based venture capital firm, and its subsidiary Scrum Studio, today announced 8 startups selected to join the second year of Hokkaido F Village X (HFX), a global co-creation program designed to foster innovation among international startups, leading Japanese corporations, and local municipalities in Hokkaido. The program is based at the Hokkaido Ballpark F Village in Kitahiroshima City, Japan, and aims to leverage new technology to enhance the region’s appeal and address local challenges.

Year 2 attracted hundreds of applications from 36 countries worldwide. The program accepted startups across five categories: Sports, Entertainment & Stadiums; Food & Agriculture; Mobility; Sustainability; and Wellbeing. These startups will now enter a business co-creation phase with HFX partners, including Yamato Holdings Co., Ltd., JTB Corp., Tokyu Land Corporation, The Hokkaido Bank, Ltd., NH Foods Ltd., and Hokkaido Gas Co., Ltd., as well as the municipal partner Kitahiroshima City. Operational support is provided by Fighters Sports & Entertainment Co., Ltd.

Selected Startups

• GUDEA (U.S.) https://gudea.ai
  Category: Sports, Entertainment & Stadiums
  An AI platform that captures online information spread and shifts in public opinion, supporting risk response and decision-making for brands.
• IXON (Hong Kong) https://ixon.com.hk
  Category: Food & Agriculture
  Proprietary low-temperature aseptic packaging that achieves long-term food preservation without preservatives or refrigeration, while retaining taste, texture, and nutritional value.
• Kyomei (England) https://kyomei.co.uk
  Category: Food & Agriculture
  Biotechnology company extracting Rubisco, a highly nutritious and functional food protein, from underutilized agricultural sidestreams.
• Lumana (U.S.) https://lumana.ai
  Category: Sports, Entertainment & Stadiums
  An AI video security platform that enhances security, safety, and operations by transforming existing cameras into intelligent AI agents.
• Sonic Fire Tech (U.S.) https://sonicfiretech.com
  Category: Sustainability
  A next-generation fire defense system that uses low-frequency sound to prevent ignition and suppress fires.
• ThermoShade (U.S.) https://getthermoshade.com
  Category: Wellbeing
  Low-power, water-free cooling shade panels that reduce heat and improve thermal comfort for outdoor spaces, facilities, livestock, and temperature-sensitive equipment.
• Tidal Metals (U.S.) https://tidalmetals.com
  Category: Sustainability
  Proprietary technology that sustainably harvests magnesium from seawater or desalination brine at scale and low cost.
• Transreport Limited (England) https://transreport.co.uk
  Category: Mobility.
  A platform that connects people with diverse mobility needs, including elderly individuals and people with disabilities, with transportation operators, providing integrated information and services tailored to passenger needs.

HFX Kickoff Week in Hokkaido

From August 25, the selected startups gathered in Hokkaido for HFX Kickoff Week. The program included site visits across the region and meetings with corporate and municipal partners, giving startups a deeper understanding of Hokkaido and an opportunity to explore how their technologies can support the region and help solve local challenges.

About Scrum Ventures
Scrum Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm with offices in San Francisco and Tokyo. The firm has invested in more than 150 startups across AI & robotics, climate tech, mobility, healthcare, commerce, and sports & entertainment. Scrum Ventures provides portfolio companies with hands-on business development support, co-investor introductions, and global expansion resources. scrum.vc

About Scrum Studio
Scrum Studio is a Scrum Ventures subsidiary that drives business co-creation between global Japanese corporations, global startups, and municipalities. Through programs such as Hokkaido F Village X and Full Bloom, Scrum Studio facilitates open-innovation partnerships that move from concept to commercial reality. The company also supports international startups navigating Japan market entry. scrum.vc/ja/studio

Press inquiries: [email protected]

SOURCE Scrum Ventures