The voice AI platform grew from a side project to $21M ARR and 8 million users in its first year

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 28, 2026 — Fish Audio, the AI voice platform for expressive real-time text-to-speech, voice cloning, and voice agents, today announced $52 million in seed funding led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, Alphalist Partners, and leading angel investors. The round comes as the company marks its first anniversary, having grown from zero to $21 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users across creators, developers, and enterprises.

Fish Audio began in the bedroom of Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Shijia Liao, a former NVIDIA video researcher and lifelong VTuber and anime fan frustrated with monotonous synthetic voices. Training models on a single gaming GPU, he set out to fix it. The resulting open-source project, Fish Speech, quickly became one of the most popular voice projects on GitHub with more than 31,000 stars and a devoted following among indie developers, video game designers, and creators. Now, Fish Audio is one of the fastest-growing companies in voice AI, capable of cloning a voice from a 5-second clip in roughly 15 seconds, supporting 83+ languages, and providing word-level emotion control with more than 15,000 natural language controls. From the start, the mission has been to make expressive, high-quality voice AI accessible to everyone, and the company’s growth shows that mission is resonating.

“We built Fish Audio because we wanted voice AI that sounded human, not chunky or robotic, and we wanted that quality to be accessible at any scale,” said Rissa Cao, co-founder and CEO of Fish Audio. “We make high-quality, human-sounding voices available to every user, from beginner creatives to million-dollar enterprises, so communication is not only more efficient, but more trustworthy. We’ve always believed that if we kept making the models better, people would notice. Eight million of them did. There’s a lot of work left to do, and now we have the resources to do it.”

Fish Audio voice AI models meet the demands of the most ambitious developers and enterprises. Its models are fast, easy to integrate, and competitive with the best in the category. Its most recent model, S2.1 Pro, is preferred by nearly 67% of listeners over leading competitors in blind listening tests. For enterprises operating in regulated industries, Fish Audio provides on-premises deployment, zero-data-retention policies, and HIPAA-compliant configurations, giving security and procurement teams the assurances they need without slowing innovation.

“Voice is becoming the default interface for AI, and Fish Audio is unlocking this opportunity to a new generation of creators, developers, and enterprises,” said Osuke Honda, Managing Partner at Coreline Ventures. “In its short history, Fish Audio has built an unbeatable track record of pushing the envelope on performance, multilingual support, emotional expression, and cost. All factors that have quickly made Fish Audio the default choice for creators, developers, and now enterprises globally, and we expect them to continue to lead the way.”

Fish Audio will use the funding to expand its model lineup beyond text-to-speech into the full audio-native stack, including voice-native LLMs, speech-to-speech and more; build out its enterprise sales team; and deepen developer tooling and integrations with partners like LiveKit and Retell.

Through the end of August, the company’s largest and most robust model, S2.1 Pro, will be free for developers via API. Begin building today at fish.audio.

About Fish Audio
Fish Audio is the AI voice platform built for speed and control, for developers and enterprises alike. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Palo Alto, Fish Audio grew out of Fish Speech, one of the most-starred open-source voice projects on GitHub, into a platform serving more than 8 million creators, developers, and enterprises, including HeyGen, Retell, LiveKit, OpenArt, Telnyx and Sanas. Its open models deliver expressive, real-time text-to-speech, voice cloning, and voice agents in more than 83 languages, and can be self-hosted for teams that want full control over their data and infrastructure. To learn more, visit fish.audio.

SOURCE Fish Audio

• As antimicrobial resistance accelerates, when every hour can matter, faster diagnostics can help clinicians get patients on the right antibiotics sooner
  
• Vivid Dx’s direct-from-blood platform uses light and AI to identify dangerous pathogens, aiming to move infectious disease care from broad-spectrum empiric therapy to targeted treatment
  
• Keith O’Neill appointed as CEO to lead Vivid Dx through clinical validation and toward commercialization, drawing on 25 years of international experience advancing healthcare innovation

OXFORD, England, July 28, 2026 — Vivid Dx, a precision diagnostics company transforming pathogen detection and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) testing, today announced $15 million in seed financing co-led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Cedars-Sinai Intellectual Property Co., with participation from Jameel Investment Management Company and additional strategic investors. The company also announced the appointment of scientist and diagnostics executive Keith O’Neill as chief executive officer to lead its next phase of clinical and commercial development.

When a patient may have sepsis, every hour matters. Hospitals often have to wait days to learn which pathogen is causing the infection and which antibiotics are most likely to work. During that window, clinicians are forced to treat without complete information, often relying on broad-spectrum antibiotics that may not work against drug-resistant infections. This delay is a major public health issue: researchers estimate antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could contribute to 39 million deaths globally between 2025 and 2050. As hospitals face tighter antibiotic stewardship requirements and growing pressure to protect last-line therapies, faster diagnostics are becoming essential to giving patients the right treatment sooner while helping slow the spread of resistance.

Rapid infectious disease diagnostics have long faced a difficult challenge: hospitals need faster answers, but those answers also need to be accurate, broad enough to guide treatment, and practical for clinical workflows. Vivid Dx is addressing that challenge by applying AI/ML and advanced sample preparation to Raman spectroscopy, a validated technology with the capability to read biochemical signatures from individual pathogen cells. By combining direct-from-blood pathogen isolation, proprietary Raman spectral databases, and AI-powered signal interpretation, Vivid Dx’s platform is designed to identify pathogens and support phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) directly from blood, with the goal of reducing testing timelines from days to hours.

For hospitals, those earlier insights could help clinicians move from broad-spectrum empiric therapy to targeted treatment sooner, potentially reducing ICU stays, lowering treatment costs, and improving patient outcomes. Faster, more precise treatment decisions could also reduce unnecessary antibiotic exposure, an important factor in slowing the evolution of AMR.

“For decades, clinicians treating serious infections have had to wait too long for the information needed to guide antibiotic treatment. The biggest delay in today’s workflow happens before many diagnostic systems can even begin: clinicians are waiting for culture,” said Keith O’Neill, incoming chief executive officer of Vivid Dx. “Our goal is to move those answers closer to the moment a blood sample is taken. The company has built strong technical foundations, and my focus will be advancing that work through clinical validation and toward a platform that clinicians can adopt routinely to inform patient care decisions.”

O’Neill’s appointment brings Vivid Dx experience spanning scientific research, diagnostics development, global healthcare innovation, and company building. He worked at MIT on the Human Genome Project, built a multi-institution point-of-care diagnostics program, supported early-stage life sciences companies through Enterprise Ireland, and built global innovation alliances at Abbott. Most recently, he served as CEO of Novus Diagnostics, where he advanced the development of a rapid point-of-care test for bloodstream infections.

Vivid Dx is now preparing to test its platform with patient-derived clinical samples, a key step toward showing that the technology can perform in the kinds of complex cases hospitals see every day. To date, the company has achieved proof-of-concept across core platform components, including direct-from-blood pathogen isolation, high-purity bacterial recovery, AI-powered Raman signal enhancement, and development of a proprietary spectral database containing thousands of clinical isolates. In preclinical testing, the platform demonstrated approximately 99% pathogen identification accuracy, and roughly 92% concordance for phenotypic AST testing compared with gold-standard methods.

“Vivid Dx has built strong technical proof across the core platform and is now advancing toward clinical validation,” said Tony Besse, Principal, Health Tech at Oxford Science Enterprises. “The need for faster infectious disease testing is urgent, but speed alone is not enough—hospitals need results they can trust and integrate into care pathways. We look forward to supporting Vivid Dx as it takes the next step from technical proof toward the evidence needed for adoption at scale.”

“Over the next decade, it’s crucial that physicians globally adopt technologies that can help identify pathogens and guide therapy decisions faster and more precisely for drug-resistant infections,” said Nirdesh Gupta, Managing Director, Cedars-Sinai Technology Ventures at Cedars-Sinai. “We see significant potential in Vivid Dx’s approach combining blood-based testing and AI-driven analysis, and look forward to seeing the platform progress through clinical validation as it works to support faster, more informed infectious disease treatment decisions.”

About Vivid Dx
Vivid Dx is a precision diagnostics company developing rapid infectious disease testing to help hospitals identify dangerous pathogens and guide faster antibiotic decisions. The company has developed a direct-from-blood platform designed to use Raman spectroscopy and AI to detect infections and support phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing, with the goal of reducing diagnostic timelines from days to hours. Vivid Dx’s work is focused on improving treatment decisions for life-threatening infections such as sepsis while helping address the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Vivid Dx is backed by Oxford Science Enterprises, Cedars-Sinai, Jameel Investment Management Company, and additional strategic investors. Learn more at vivid-dx.com.

Media contact:
[email protected]

SOURCE Vivid Dx

• Breaking the cycle of uncertainty and guesswork for those living with autoimmune disease and other complex chronic conditions, Mirae’s AI companion turns day-to-day signals into a living medical library, helping patients understand their condition, catch flares earlier, and make more informed care decisions

• Every clinician can now deliver care to a center-of-excellence standard, supported by Mirae’s continuous patient data and validated, peer-reviewed evidence, enabling earlier detection, more accurate assessment, and more precise treatment decisions

• Mirae’s AI-driven model shifts superior outcomes out of expensive inpatient settings and into everyday outpatient practice, allowing high-quality care to be delivered earlier, more consistently, and without reliance on hospital-based intervention

NEW YORK, July 28, 2026 — Mirae, an AI-driven continuous care platform for autoimmune disease and other complex chronic conditions, today announced $5.4 million in funding led by Oxford Science Enterprises. Mirae captures what patients experience between visits and converts it into a continuous, structured view of disease that clinicians can act on at the point of care, combining patient-reported data with clinical context and peer-reviewed evidence to support more informed, timely treatment decisions.

Mirae builds directly on research from the University of Oxford’s Computational Health Informatics Lab, where co-founder Dr. David Clifton has led work in modeling disease progression using large-scale, longitudinal clinical data. The company is initially focused on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a condition marked by unpredictable flares, complex medication decisions, and highly variable treatment responses. The platform is being deployed with a leading U.S. health system, providing ongoing access to real-world patient data to support model development and validation.

Autoimmune disease and other complex chronic conditions place a high burden on both patients and health systems because they evolve continuously but are managed episodically. Chronic disease could cost the U.S. up to $47 trillion over the next 15 years, with medical and productivity losses contributing to nearly $13,000 per American. Yet care is still delivered through infrequent visits that provide only limited snapshots of a patient’s condition, leaving patients to manage their disease day to day without structured support, and clinicians to make decisions without visibility into how symptoms, behaviors, and treatment responses evolve.

“Where you live should not dictate the quality of care you receive. A lot of the variability in care and outcomes comes from the fact that clinicians are working without a full view of what has happened between visits” said Anuj Patel, co-founder and CEO of Mirae. “The limitations of AI in understanding and modeling complex disease comes from the fact that patients are living with their disease every day, but that experience rarely makes it into the clinical record in a usable way. When you combine experiential data with clinical data, you begin to understand and model disease more effectively and have a path towards true precision medicine. Every patient deserves access to world class decision-making for their care and the tools to take ownership over their condition between visits.”

For patients, Mirae is designed to fit into daily life, turning small, everyday inputs into something clinically meaningful. People can describe symptoms, daily behaviors, medications, and changes in plain language as they happen, without needing to actively structure or organize. Mirae’s conversational AI asks follow-up questions, tracks patterns, and builds a continuous record of how their condition is evolving. As that history builds, it helps patients understand what tends to trigger symptoms, how they’ve responded to treatment, and what has changed. It also prepares them for care moments by summarizing key trends, making it easier to have more informed conversations with their care team.

For clinicians, Mirae’s AI copilot provides a structured, up-to-date view of what has happened between visits, bringing together symptom trajectories, treatment history, lab data, and other inputs into a single, patient-specific picture. Before or during an appointment, clinicians can see how the disease has been evolving, rather than relying on fragmented notes or patient recall. This shifts time away from reconstructing the patient’s history and toward evaluating treatment options and next steps, while also supporting ongoing monitoring as new signals emerge.

“AI is moving quickly into healthcare, but much of that activity remains broad, generalized, and disconnected from the clinical decisions that determine outcomes,” said Joel Schoppig, Health Tech Principal, Oxford Science Enterprises. “Its greatest impact will come from areas where decisions are complex, conditions evolve, and the cost of getting those decisions wrong is high. Mirae is building for this deeper layer of medicine, where patient context, clinical evidence, and workflow need to come together to support a higher standard of care.”

About Mirae
Mirae is building a new model for managing autoimmune disease and other complex chronic conditions, starting with inflammatory bowel disease. The company’s conversational AI turns everyday patient input into structured, longitudinal insight, enabling earlier intervention and more informed treatment decisions. Developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oxford and designed for integration into clinical workflows, Mirae connects patient experience, clinical data, and peer-reviewed evidence into a continuous system of care. By extending the reach of specialty medicine beyond episodic visits, Mirae aims to make high-quality, data-driven care more consistent, more responsive, and more accessible across patient populations. Find out more at miraehealth.ai.

Media contact
[email protected]

SOURCE Mirae

NEST brings financial literacy, business mentorship, and seed funding to underserved and refugee youth across Metro Atlanta — closing a curriculum gap most Georgia high schoolers never know exists.

ATLANTA, July 28, 2026 — In the schools with the fewest resources, the gap isn’t ambition. It’s access. Most Georgia high schoolers graduate without ever learning how to build a budget, read a term sheet, or file an LLC; and for students from low-income, immigrant, and refugee families, that gap compounds into a lifetime of lost opportunity.

NEST (New Entrepreneurs Shaping Tomorrow), a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, was built to close it. NEST delivers business and financial education, mentorship, and real seed capital directly to the students least likely to encounter any of it — proving that the barrier was never talent, only opportunity.

The results speak for themselves. NEST has engaged more than 70 high school students, delivered over 65 hours of business, finance, and marketing seminars at no cost to participants, and raised $29,000 to fund education initiatives and seed student startups. Fourteen student-run companies are currently in development, and NEST has built partnerships with six Georgia-based programs, with new chapters taking root in Florida.

At the heart of the program are NEST Tutoring Seminars — free, interactive sessions led by high school and college mentors covering budgeting, saving, investing, marketing, public speaking, 3D prototyping, and training language learning models. These are the practical skills students say their schools simply don’t teach.

Founder of NEST Business Competition Kubby Bhatia’s own path to founding the nonprofit began at LaunchX, an entrepreneurship program where he helped build a startup alongside other student innovators. That experience showed him how many young people have creative, impactful ideas but never get the chance or guidance to pursue them. He noticed that while plenty of nonprofits focus on academics or traditional enrichment, few create space for underserved youth to solve real-world problems through entrepreneurship — so, as a sophomore at The Westminster Schools, he started NEST to make business education and startup opportunities more accessible, personal, and community-driven.

“Bringing business to my community and peers means giving them the resources to drive real change,” said Bhatia. “A lot of these students have the ideas and the drive already. What they’ve never had is someone to hand them the tools, the mentorship, and the check. If we invest now, we plant the seed that change is possible.”

Take Halelulya Tesfamariam. He came to NEST with a strong idea; he’s leaving with a company. His startup, StockSmart, creates inventory and operations software built for field-service businesses like locksmiths, inspectors, HVAC contractors, and mobile mechanics. He won $2,500 in NEST funding — placing 2nd in the Spring 2026 competition behind Sentinel, a disaster-response drone platform that took first place and $5,000. The award let Halelulya file for an LLC and launch a live landing page at stocksmart.pages.dev.

How to Enter — and What Students Could Win

Students don’t just learn theory, they pitch. Competitors present original business concepts to a panel of judges for a chance to win funding to launch their idea, plus ongoing mentorship to take it further.

Registration for the next NEST Business Competition is open now and completely free. Here’s what it takes:

• Who can apply: Any Georgia high school student, individually or in teams of up to four. Each student or team may submit one pitch, and past winners are welcome to return with a new idea.
• What to submit: A 4-5 minute pitch video (recorded anywhere — a classroom, an office, outside) covering the problem being solved, the product or service, target market, competitive edge, business model, financial projections, and the idea’s broader impact and vision.
• Key dates: Early video submissions are due August 10th, with a regular submission deadline of August 24th. The top 10 pitches advance to a live “Shark Tank–style” Finale at the NEST Summit, where finalists get 5 minutes to pitch plus a 2-minute judges’ Q&A.
• What’s on the line: Cash seed funding — $5,000 for first place, $2,500 for second, and $1,000 for third — plus ongoing mentorship. The funding goes directly toward building the business: materials, subscriptions, domains, and other startup essentials. Students keep full ownership of their ideas.

Whether you have a fully built idea or just a spark of one, NEST is designed to take you further than you thought possible this early. Register today at nestbusinesscompetition.com or contact [email protected].

About NEST Business Competition

NEST (New Entrepreneurs Shaping Tomorrow) is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit expanding access to business and financial education for all students across Georgia. Through free pitch competitions, seminars, mentorship, and seed funding, NEST helps students build real ventures and real futures. Learn more at nestbusinesscompetition.com.

SOURCE Nest Business Competition Inc.

The company has given families nationwide access to $33 million in benefits, covering out-of-pocket costs for care from hospital stays to chronic conditions

COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 28, 2026 — Healia, a Columbus-based company that reduces health benefit costs for dual-income families and employers, today announced $18 million in funding, including a $14M Series A led by 111° West Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Pioneer Fund, GoAhead Ventures, and North Coast Ventures. To date, Healia has enabled employers to provide $33 million in additional coverage for families nationwide, equipping families to make healthcare’s most consequential decisions as one household, with the full picture in view.

Roughly 30 million American dual-income families are underserved by a healthcare system designed for the 1960s household: one breadwinner, one plan, a spouse at home. Most of those families now have access to two employer plans, and the system quietly overcharges them for having both. That’s because employers pay to cover working spouses who already have coverage elsewhere, and families default to the plan they know because comparing two plans across two enrollment portals is a headache no one is set up to solve.

Healia is a healthcare benefits platform built for dual-income families. Healia’s Total Care Option (TCO) enables employers to pay a family’s out-of-pocket costs and premiums when they enroll in a spouse’s health plan instead of the company’s. Families pay little to nothing for their healthcare, and employers cut their spend significantly.

Here’s how the Total Care Option works:

• Healia compares the family’s health plan options: It prices every path, staying on separate plans or moving to the spouse’s plan with the TCO, and identifies the least expensive choice for the household.
• Families enroll in a spouse’s plan and the TCO: When a family enrolls in their spouse’s plan, they also receive the TCO to help reimburse essential medical expenses.
• Healia manages the entire claims process: When the family incurs copays, coinsurance, deductibles, or premiums on the spouse’s plan, the employer reimburses them through Healia in a matter of hours.

“Healia saved us thousands during the most stressful year of our lives. When my husband’s company implemented Healia, the decision support tool made it a no-brainer: we enrolled in the Total Care Option and added him to my employer’s plan. We found out we were pregnant on New Year’s Day, and between our daughter’s birth and my own cancer diagnosis that year, we submitted a lot of claims. Often we’d get reimbursed before the provider bill even arrived. Our friends and family were shocked. Honestly, so were we,” said one early Healia member in Phoenix, Arizona.

The result is a rare win-win in employer-sponsored healthcare. A family expecting a baby, managing a diagnosis, or living with a chronic condition pays little to nothing out of pocket, saving up to $26,000 a year. Employers are able to provide meaningful benefits that retain and recruit employees while lowering their healthcare costs up to 76% per enrolled household annually.

“In 5 years, picking a health plan will work the way it should have all along. Every family will see both plans side by side, know exactly what each one costs them, and get paid back for choosing well. When 30 million households make that decision with full information, the whole market has to respond. Plans will compete for families instead of families accepting the status quo,” said Priyang Shah, founder and CEO of Healia.

“Millions of dual-income families are paying twice for healthcare coverage they don’t need, yet the employer healthcare system has largely ignored the problem. I spent more than a decade in healthcare operations, including co-founding TigerConnect, so I recognize structural inefficiencies when I see them. This is one of the clearest I’ve encountered. Priyang combines the product vision, operational discipline, and execution capabilities needed to solve it at scale and deliver meaningful savings for working families” said Andrew Brooks, M.D., Co-Founder and Managing Partner at 111° West Capital.

Healia will use the funding to build its next generation of leaders across sales, engineering, and operations in Columbus while investing in the technology and AI underpinning the TCO. The company is recruiting people who want startup pace and ownership without leaving the heartland to get it.

Open roles are at healiahealth.com/careers.

About Healia

Healia is a Columbus, Ohio, health tech company that builds health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) for employers. Its Total Care Option (TCO) reduces benefit costs for employers and out-of-pocket costs for dual-income employees: when an employee enrolls in a spouse’s plan, Healia enables employers to reimburse the family’s out-of-pocket costs in full. Employers using Healia have provided $33M in additional coverage to their employees since its founding in 2021. Learn more at healiahealth.com.

Media Contact:
Kelsey LaBelle
[email protected]

SOURCE Healia

• Embedded digital dollar wallet volume up 263x year-on-year as stablecoins become core part of B2B payments infrastructure
• PSPs and fintechs have overtaken trading as the platform’s largest customer segment, signalling stablecoins‘ shift into mainstream payments

LONDON, July 28, 2026 — Businesses are increasingly replacing elements of traditional banking infrastructure with embedded stablecoin wallets, according to new proprietary data from BVNK. It shows embedded wallet volume increasing 263x during 2025 as companies adopted digital dollar accounts for global payments, enabling faster and lower-cost ways of holding, moving and converting value.

BVNK is a  leading provider of stablecoin infrastructure, processing more than $36 billion in annualised payment volume. The new data shows a shift toward businesses using stablecoins as “programmable dollars” that can operate outside of banking hours. Half of all BVNK’s transactions now take place outside standard banking hours, and after-hours transaction volume grew from 24% to 31% of total platform volume year-on-year, with volume rising from $2.65 billion to $8.83 billion. This suggests larger, higher-value business flows moving outside traditional banking windows as stablecoins shift from experimentation into infrastructure.

Enterprise adoption

BVNK’s data shows that stablecoin adoption is broadening beyond crypto-native firms. Payment service providers and fintechs have overtaken retail trading firms as BVNK’s largest customer segment, now accounting for 75% of platform volume, reflecting growing demand from companies rebuilding payment infrastructure around stablecoins.

Rather than simply using stablecoins for trading or treasury management, businesses are increasingly embedding digital dollar accounts directly into their products, creating an always-on payments layer alongside traditional banking infrastructure.

“Moving money across borders and between currencies has historically been slow and expensive. Businesses have relied on correspondent banking networks that can take days and add fees at every step.” said Chris Harmse, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at BVNK.

“Stablecoin wallets change that – they act as a proxy for a global dollar account: a single balance a business can hold, move and convert anywhere, instantly, without waiting on banking hours or intermediaries. Businesses are no longer experimenting with stablecoins, they’re rebuilding their payment infrastructure around them.”

BVNK’s 2025-2026 data showed stablecoin growth to be fastest in markets where dollar access has historically been constrained:

• Latin America pay-in volume grew 22x (led by Colombia, Argentina and Brazil);
• UK pay-in volume grew 19x, UK pay-out volume grew 5.17x
• APAC pay-out volume grew 3.4x
• Africa pay-out volume grew 4x

A practical playbook for launching wallets

Embedded stablecoin wallets enable businesses and individuals to send, receive, store, and convert stablecoins across borders and outside of the limits of traditional banking hours, and BVNK is already seeing customers build wallets into their infrastructure at scale.

Corporate payments provider, Corpay, which processes more than $12 billion in payments and $26 billion in foreign exchange each month across 145+ currencies, has integrated BVNK’s stablecoin wallets and settlement capabilities into its platform, giving customers 24/7 payment rails beyond the fixed hours of traditional banking infrastructure. The integration is also improving Corpay’s own capital efficiency, reducing reliance on pre-funded accounts and enabling faster movement of funds across its global footprint.

Global HR and compliance platform Ontop, fintech platform, Meow, and payment infrastructure provider TransferMate are among the other BVNK customers building similar capabilities into their own platforms.

To help businesses evaluate stablecoin wallets, BVNK has published a practical implementation guide covering compliance, infrastructure choices and deployment models. It also highlights use cases such as B2B payments, salary and gig payouts, P2P remittances and digital dollar accounts.

In addition to the guide, BVNK will be hosting a live Stablecoin Wallets 101 session on August 13 for teams evaluating stablecoin wallets, covering fundamentals and practical considerations for launch.

About BVNK: BVNK is the stablecoin-powered financial stack for enterprises. Build financial products. Unlock new markets. Move money in seconds across 130+ countries. One platform for every use case. Trusted by Worldpay, Deel, Corpay and Flywire. Processing billions annually. Learn more at BVNK.com.  

SOURCE BVNK

Twenty top early-stage venture capital firms co-host the second annual event, connecting the builders, backers, and buyers defining the future of enterprise AI

SAN FRANCISCO, July 28, 2026 — Connected Stack, the invitation-only summit bringing together the leaders shaping the future of enterprise AI, returns to San Francisco on Thursday, September 10, 2026.

Enterprise AI has moved from experimentation to large-scale deployment, and the questions that matter have changed with it. Now in its second year, Connected Stack convenes the  startup founders building the next generation of category-defining AI companies with early-stage investors and the enterprise executives deploying frontier AI. The day is designed to foster high-impact connections through founder flash talks, executive keynotes, and focused spotlight conversations.

The 2026 event is co-hosted by twenty of the industry’s leading venture firms: True Ventures, Accel, Addition, a16z, Ballistic Ventures, Battery Ventures, Conviction, Felicis, Forerunner, Greylock, GTM Capital, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures, Modern Technical Fund, Notable Capital, NVIDIA Inception Program, Redpoint, and Sound Ventures.

“We’ve watched this market move from demos to deployments to a much harder question: what does an enterprise actually trust with its data, workflows, and customers,” said Jon Callaghan, Co-founder and Managing Partner of True Ventures, a Connected Stack co-host. “The answer comes down to proof, and for the founders delivering it, this is the vintage of a lifetime. Get the builders, backers, and buyers in one room, and the whole industry moves faster than any one firm could push it.”

MTS, the always-on, timeline-native news network covering technology, AI, finance, and internet culture, will broadcast live from Connected Stack. Launched this spring with backing from a16z, MTS has quickly become one of the industry’s fastest-growing live media platforms. On September 10, it will turn its cameras to Connected Stack to cover the future of enterprise AI.

“We’re back at Connected Stack because last year’s room delivered – conversations that started there became pilots, partnerships, and deployments,” said Frédérique Dame, General Partner at GV, a returning co-host.

“The enterprise stack has been rebuilt many times; it’s only been reinvented once, and that’s now,” said Anish Acharya, General Partner at a16z, a returning co-host. “This is the group laying that architecture.”

“In enterprise AI, the companies that end up mattering most are usually the ones enterprises haven’t started buying from yet,” said Mamoon Hamid, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, a returning co-host. “This is the room where those introductions happen early — before the category leaders are obvious.”

Connected Stack is proudly supported by Lowenstein Sandler, Aduro Advisors, Attivo Partners, Goodwin Procter, and Silicon Valley Bank.

The full 2026 speaker lineup, including headlining keynotes, will be announced in August. Registration is limited. Learn more and request an invitation at connectedstack.ai.

About Connected Stack

Connected Stack is the premier gathering for enterprise AI, bringing together founders, operators, investors, and Fortune 1000 executives shaping the future of enterprise technology. Held annually in San Francisco, the event sits at the center of the AI startup ecosystem, creating meaningful connections between the builders of frontier AI and the enterprises deploying it at scale. Previous speakers have included Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Anthropic Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith, and Box CEO Aaron Levie. Learn more at connectedstack.ai.

SOURCE Connected Stack

Company’s new identity reflects the evolution of its proprietary bioaerogel platform while reaffirming its mission to restore human health through advanced biomaterials.

CLEVELAND, July 28, 2026 — Auxilium Health today announced that it is becoming Aeris Biosciences™. The name is new. The mission is not. Since its founding, the company has existed to restore human health, and that work continues with the same team and the same science, now matched by the resources and partners to pursue it faster, and a sharper sense of what it can become.

When the company started, the field knew it for its focus on soft-tissue healing. But its technology was never only about wounds. It is a platform: a new class of three-dimensional bioaerogels designed to inhibit bacterial colonization while guiding tissue regeneration, giving clinicians precise control over healing across wound repair, bone regeneration, and therapeutic delivery.

Aeris reflects what the company’s biomaterials are at their core. “Aer™” signals their foundation, their lightness, and spatial openness. “Biosciences” anchors the company in scientific rigor and clinical impact. Together they name a company built to work the way biology works: in three dimensions, where the architecture and surface of a material becomes the framework the body builds on.

The company believes materials must evolve with clinical standards. For too long, biomaterials have been passive, static surfaces that ask the body to heal around them. The standard of care keeps advancing, and the materials beneath it should advance too: sensing, responding, and actively shaping the environment in which healing happens. That conviction is the foundation of Aeris, and of a more resilient future, one in which healing is faster, safer, and more predictable for the patients and clinicians who depend on it.

“The name is new, but the promise behind it isn’t,” said Isaiah Kaiser, PhD, Founder and CEO of Aeris Biosciences™. “We built this company to restore human health, and every product we develop still answers that. Behind every wound, every implant, every difficult recovery is a person waiting to heal, and the people beside them waiting too. Aeris is our commitment to meet that moment with biomaterials that actively guide the body forward, and to keep building toward a future where healing is something clinicians can count on.”

About Aeris Biosciences

Aeris Biosciences, formerly Auxilium Health, develops a new class of bioaerogels that reduce the risk of bacterial colonization and guide tissue regeneration. Its Aer™ platform spans wound repair, bone regeneration, and localized therapeutic delivery, with a lead product advancing toward FDA clearance and clinical studies. Headquartered at the Cleveland Clinic’s Global Innovation Center, the company is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ohio Department of Development, and the Polymer Industry Cluster.

Learn more at https://aerisbio.com/ and follow Aeris Biosciences on LinkedIn.

Regeneration begins at the surface.

Media Contact
Lindsey Dinneen
Director of Marketing & Engagement
Project Medtech
Email: [email protected] 

SOURCE Aeris Biosciences

Three Companies, One Platform

The $10 million will fund two additional acquisitions, to be announced in coming months. Procode intends to follow the same playbook it used with The Auctus Group: acquire the best surgical billing companies and layer in Procode’s AI to drive better outcomes for surgeons:

• Procode: AI coding for surgery that automates the coding workflow from charge capture to submission, reduces coding-related denials, and fully captures reimbursements
• Procollect: An operating system for billing teams with native reporting, AI support and automation that reduces days in AR and accelerates reimbursements
• Auctus Provider App: An app that puts real-time financial data at Procode’s clients’ fingertips

“We’re on track to double The Auctus Group’s revenue and quintuple its EBITDA margin,” said Jeff Cripe, CEO of Procode. “That matters because we bill on contingency — we only get paid when our clients get paid — so our growth is proof our AI is putting more dollars in providers’ pockets, not just automating paperwork. Large health systems have had incredible technology companies innovating on their most pressing problems for years. We’re proud to innovate on behalf of the massive, long tail of RCM companies serving private practice surgeons.”

Procode AI Outperforms Professional Coders and Major LLMs

The retrospective comparative study published in PRS Global Open, “Artificial Intelligence for Automated CPT Coding in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Using a Fine-Tuned Hybrid LLM,” compared Procode AI’s fine-tuned hybrid LLM against OpenAI GPT-5, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5, and external professional auditors in reviewing operative reports at three different difficulty levels. A total of 120 case reports were analyzed (40 Easy difficulty, 40 Medium, 40 High).

Procode achieved 86.7% overall accuracy — more than double the best-performing LLM (OpenAI, 35.8%) and more than twice the accuracy of human auditors (42.5%). On easy cases, Procode was perfect: 100%. On the hardest cases (defined as including 4 or more CPT codes), it achieved 80% while general-purpose LLMs ranged from 5% to 12.5%.

“Our research shows that AI trained specifically for surgical coding can reliably outperform both humans and generic models,” said Kameron Rezzadeh, MD, FACS, cofounder and Chief Medical Officer of Procode. “That’s a step change in what billing accuracy looks like for private practice surgeons.”

Health Velocity Capital Leads Series A

Grant Blevins, Partner at Health Velocity Capital, said: “Over our careers, we have built deep expertise in revenue cycle management, developed relationships with exceptional billing practice owners, and grown increasingly convinced that this market is ready for a company that can finally deliver true end-to-end automation. Procode is uniquely positioned to do that by giving small billing practice owners a best-in-class AI strategy no traditional buyer can match, while preserving the specialty expertise that made their businesses valuable and building the category-defining RCM platform for private practice surgeons.”

About Procode Inc. Procode is an AI-powered RCM company for surgeons in private practice. Founded in 2024, Procode builds intelligent billing infrastructure that removes administrative burden and maximizes reimbursement, giving surgeons the freedom to focus on patient care. The company has raised $14 million in total venture funding and serves more than 350 plastic surgery and dermatology providers through its acquisition of The Auctus Group.

About Health Velocity Capital Health Velocity Capital invests exclusively in innovative healthcare software and services companies. The firm’s partners have more than 90 collective years as investors, entrepreneurs, and executives helping to finance and build innovative companies that created important new healthcare markets and that became market leaders, including successful companies such as Teladoc, Livongo, Change Healthcare, MDLive, Contessa Health, Headspace Health, Aspire Health, Zipari, IVX Health, Artera (fka Well Health), Compassus, Aperio, The Advisory Board Company, Healthways (Tivity Health), US Renal Care, Spero Health, OnShift, and many others. The firm counts among its limited partners many of the largest and most influential healthcare organizations in the country and current and former senior healthcare executives who collectively represent organizations that insure more than 175 million Americans, operate more than 1,000 hospitals, provide pharmacy and PBM services to everyone in the United States, and sell software to every major US health system.

Peer-reviewed research paper: 
https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/10.1097/gox.0000000000007970~artificial-intelligence-for-automated-current-procedural

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SOURCE Procode Inc.