Five accomplished executives spanning technology, finance, operations, consulting and transformation will advise the independent IT sourcing firm as it continues to grow and evolve

BOSTON, Sept. 30, 2026 — UpperEdge, an independent IT sourcing and vendor negotiation advisory firm, today announced the formation of its inaugural Advisory Board. The five members are a former biopharma CIO, two former senior leaders from Accenture and EY, a former consumer products President and CFO, and a procurement and supply chain executive. Together they bring decades of experience leading, funding and delivering large-scale technology transformation.

The board’s formation comes as large enterprises navigate a rapidly changing technology landscape, including major platform transformations, evolving cloud and AI strategies, and significant changes in how enterprise software and IT services are priced, packaged and contracted. Collectively, the five board members have experienced these decisions from multiple perspectives, including the buyer, the provider, and the business executives responsible for funding and delivering transformation.

The Advisory Board will work with UpperEdge leadership throughout the year on growth strategy, client relationships, new market opportunities and the continued evolution of the firm’s offerings. It will support the firm as it expands its advisory services and invests in new, technology-enabled ways to deliver its negotiation expertise to clients.

“UpperEdge has built a strong business, but I believe we have significant opportunity ahead of us,” said David Blake, CEO of UpperEdge. “I wanted to surround our leadership team with accomplished people who bring different experiences and perspectives, who understand the executives and organizations we serve, and who are willing to challenge our thinking. Their perspective will help us sharpen our strategy, identify new opportunities, and continue evolving UpperEdge as we enter our next phase of growth, while ultimately helping us deliver even greater value to our clients.”

Advisory Board Members

Vince Ambrosino is a consumer products executive with operational, financial and strategic leadership experience at McCain Foods, Suntory and PepsiCo. At McCain Foods, he served as President of the North America Potato Division and Chief Financial Officer for the North America Region, where he helped restore growth and profitability. As Chief Operating Officer of Suntory Holdings in Japan, he led global initiatives to strengthen the company’s operating model and expand across Asia. Earlier in his career, he held senior finance and operating roles at PepsiCo in the U.S. and Canada, contributing to turnaround efforts and sustained margin expansion.

David Davidson is an enterprise transformation executive with more than 35 years of experience in corporate strategy, large-scale ERP transformation and cost optimization. As a Senior Managing Director at Accenture, he served on the North America Leadership Team and led the firm’s CFO & Enterprise Value Strategy & Consulting practice. Since retiring from Accenture in 2022, he has advised organizations in the music, wealth management and consumer products industries through David A. Davidson Consulting.

Lori Foster is an accomplished business leader and entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience leading supply chain organizations and business transformations across multiple industries. Throughout her career, she led complex, large-scale global SAP implementations at multinational organizations, driving improvements in processes, technology, operations, and organizational performance. Today, Lori is an entrepreneur and business owner, applying her decades of leadership experience to building her own ventures.

Todd Smith is a former CIO with more than 30 years of experience leading global IT organizations through growth, transformation, and M&A. As Chief Information Officer of Horizon Therapeutics, he built a cloud-first IT organization that supported the company’s growth from $300 million to nearly $4 billion in revenue. He previously led Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ global SAP Center of Excellence and IT integration efforts and began his career at Accenture. He brings the perspective of the enterprise technology leaders UpperEdge advises.

Michael Yadgar is a technology executive and transformation strategist with more than 30 years of experience helping organizations navigate growth and large-scale change. A former partner at Accenture and EY, he built and led global SAP and technology businesses, including growing EY’s SAP practice to $2 billion in revenue. He advises C-suite executives and boards on complex transformation and operational challenges across a wide variety of industries.

The Advisory Board marks the latest step in UpperEdge’s evolution as it expands its advisory services, invests in technology-enabled offerings and continues helping the world’s largest enterprises get the most value from their technology investments.

About UpperEdge

UpperEdge is an independent IT sourcing and vendor negotiation advisory firm serving Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. UpperEdge helps enterprises plan, negotiate and manage their most significant technology investments across enterprise software, cloud, AI and IT services. Because it has no vendor affiliations, UpperEdge represents only its clients’ interests. Learn more about the Advisory Board at https://upperedge.com/who-we-are/our-team/advisory-board/.

Media Contact:
Alyssa Meyer
UpperEdge
(810) 569-2605
[email protected]

SOURCE UpperEdge

The round comes as Rivian, Anduril, Joby, and Stoke Space put Flow’s AI agents to work in live hardware programs

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2026 — Flow Engineering, the agentic platform for hardware development, today announced a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation. The round was co-led by Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners and Gavin Baker, Managing Partner at Atreides Management. Sequoia Capital, which led Flow’s Series A, also participated in the round alongside Human Capital, Evantic, SV Angel, Odyssey, EQT, with contributions from Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Mercedes-Benz CIO Jonas von Malottki, and Formula 1 world champion Nico Rosberg. Roelof Botha has additionally joined Flow’s board as an independent director and personally invested in the company.

Over the past year, AI has changed how software is developed. At many leading software companies, AI now writes the majority of new code, and iteration cycles have come down from weeks to hours.

Flow believes the same shift is now coming to hardware development, and that it will let engineering teams design systems more complex than anything built today, in a fraction of the time. Bringing that shift to hardware is a substantially harder problem than it was for software development. In hardware, a single design change can ripple across mechanical, electrical and software systems, requiring teams to coordinate updates in parallel and verify that the entire system still meets millions of requirements and constraints, including regulatory standards. Today’s systems are so complex that integration and verification can no longer be done manually. Flow is building a platform where AI agents can continuously track changes, propagate updates across teams, and verify the results in seconds. Its goal is to reduce hardware iteration cycles from months to days, just as AI has transformed software development.

“Every hardware company now has to decide how fast it will adopt AI, and those that move first will win their markets,” said Pari Singh, Founder and CEO of Flow. “Flow has emerged as the de facto platform for agentic hardware. Ninety-six percent of our customers come to Flow inbound. The category leaders in each hardware vertical (space, automotive, defense, energy, etc.) are now built on Flow.”

AI adoption is accelerating. Since its Series A last October, Flow has added General Motors PPU, Rivian and Volkswagen’s joint venture (RV Tech), Anduril, Stoke Space, Intuitive Machines, and Pacific Fusion as customers. They join existing customers like Rivian, Joby Aviation, Astranis, and Radiant Industries, which use Flow as their default hardware development platform.

Flow’s adoption at Rivian has spread organically, growing from 40 to 1,500 users in 7 months. Rivian engineers now run millions of API calls each week. “We evaluated 30 tools and nothing came close to Flow. It allows Rivian to develop faster, safer and better by bringing a collaborative approach to systems engineering,” said Scott Mackenzie, Rivian Director of Product Development, Process & Tools.

The round brings together investors who have helped shape many of the defining hardware and AI companies of the past two decades. Gracias was an early investor in Tesla and serves on the boards of SpaceX, and Neuralink; his firm, Valor Equity Partners, has also backed Anduril. Baker was an exceptionally early investor in Nvidia, Tesla, xAI and SpaceX with a focus on AI, semiconductors, and advanced computing.

“We were introduced to Flow by world class engineers we’ve worked alongside for years. The market pull we observed from trusted executives with an unusually high bar is rare. It’s what led us to spend time with the team and the problem they’re solving. This customer signal gave us the confidence to lean in and support the company at an early stage,” said Gracias.

“We’re thrilled to be investing in Flow Engineering. Flow is building the OS on which physical products are specified, verified, and eventually designed, substituting software for scarce engineering capacity as hardware programs become increasingly more complex,” added Baker.

Flow will use the new funding to build the leading AI harness for hardware engineering, allowing frontier models to work securely with sensitive engineering data on live hardware programs. It will expand its review, branching and evaluation capabilities, along with the controls that increasingly complex programs require. Flow also plans to grow its engineering team across AI and systems engineering, pursue FedRAMP authorization and other certifications for customers in regulated industries, and scale its sales team to meet rising demand.

“AI is solving foundational problems in mathematics, biology and physics. When AI is able to develop massively complex hardware systems in days, the world is going to look very different,” added Singh.

Contact

Communications at Flow

[email protected]

About Flow Engineering

Flow is building the agentic systems engineering platform for the companies building the physical world. Next-gen hardware teams use Flow as their default platform to design, build, and iterate on hardware faster without sacrificing engineering rigor. Today, thousands of engineers at companies including Rivian, Anduril, Joby, Astranis, and Radiant are building on Flow.

Flow gives these teams a living system of record that connects requirements, CAD, simulation, code, and test. On top of this system of record, Flow’s agents continuously analyze engineering changes, identify downstream impact, and verify requirements and test coverage — so work stays aligned across the tools engineers already use.

Flow is backed by Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, and Sequoia Capital.

https://flowengineering.com/

SOURCE Flow Engineering

The AI 3D multimodal model company also launches its official iOS and Android app, giving 3D printing enthusiasts a quicker, simpler way to create 3D models on their phones.

SILICON VALLEY, Calif., Sept. 30, 2026 — Meshy, the world’s leading AI 3D multimodal model company, today announced that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has surpassed US$100 million, up 100x from US$1 million in under two years, marking one of the fastest revenue ramps in the AI industry and making Meshy the first AI 3D company to reach the milestone.

The milestone caps a period of rapid scaling across every dimension of the business. Meshy is now used by more than 15 million registered users and over 3,000 companies and educational institutions worldwide, who together have generated more than 100 million 3D models on the platform. Half of the world’s ten most valuable companies, by market capitalization or private valuation, are Meshy customers, and teams at 200 of the Fortune Global 500 build with Meshy.

Meshy launched the world’s first publicly accessible generative AI product for 3D in 2023, creating the category, and has led it ever since in model capability, user scale and revenue. This month, the company released Meshy 7.1, raising geometry generation to Ultra 4K resolution, and open-sourced its full alignment benchmark suite for image-to-3D generation: on both the geometry and texture benchmarks, Meshy 7 leads the industry, scoring 5.6 percentage points above the average of the latest comparable systems in end-to-end texture alignment. The $100 million milestone shows that the hardest frontier in multimodal AI now runs as a scaled, sustainable business. In July 2026, the company closed a nearly $400 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, the largest funding round to date in AI 3D.

“Surpassing $100 million in ARR in under two years reflects the growing demand for AI-powered 3D creation,” said Faye Pan, VP of Growth at Meshy. “From game studios and film teams to educators and home 3D printing enthusiasts, our customers are showing just how broadly this technology can be used—and how much opportunity lies ahead. We’re grateful to the customers and creators who have trusted Meshy to bring their ideas to life. Their creativity and support have made this milestone possible.”

Understanding and generation: the division of labor behind the growth

Meshy’s climb from US$1 million to US$100 million in ARR coincided with the fastest two years of progress in general-purpose models, culminating in releases such as GPT-6 Astra. The two curves are connected: frontier models excel at understanding, planning and coding, while Meshy’s diffusion-based foundation models excel at generation, reconstructing every detail of a text prompt or an image into assets ready for a game engine or a 3D printer, typically in under a minute. A general model knows a face has two eyes; Meshy knows exactly how large those eyes should be. The two already work together in production: the spatial understanding of frontier models can drive Meshy’s API to turn a single image into a complete 3D scene, a workflow that was impossible a model generation ago.

The official Meshy mobile app is now live

Alongside the milestone, Meshy announced that its official mobile app is now available on iOS and Android. Powered by Meshy 7, the app turns photos, sketches and text into fully textured 3D models directly on a phone, with printability checks, AI repair, AR preview and export to industry-standard formats including STL, GLB, FBX, OBJ, USDZ and 3MF. Every creation syncs across web and mobile through a single Meshy account, and users can explore and remix models from the Meshy community.

The app makes 3D creation more accessible than ever: anyone can photograph an object, generate a model in about a minute, preview it in AR at real-world scale, and send it to a 3D printer, with the entire workflow running on a phone.

From AI for Work to AI for Fun

Meshy’s mission is an unlimited supply of fun powered by AI. Mora, the research architecture (Multimodal Open-world Real-time Architecture) it recently introduced, generates explorable, interactive worlds in real time; a publicly playable early demonstration, Mora 1, is live at mora.fun. The company’s first AI-native game, Black Box: Infinite Arsenal, generates in-game gear and combat mechanics from player prompts and makes its official public debut at Steam Next Fest at the end of 2026. Nearly all of the industry’s attention and resources today go to AI for work. Meshy is one of the earliest companies building for the phase after it, and among the best prepared.

“Much of AI’s early progress has focused on helping people work more efficiently. We see an equally exciting opportunity to help people create, express themselves and play,” Faye Pan added. “Across games, film and interactive worlds, AI is opening up new possibilities for both creators and audiences. Mora offers a glimpse of that future: worlds people can generate, explore and play in, all in real time. Our ambition is to make the possibilities for creativity and play limitless, and we’re building toward that vision step by step.”

About Meshy

Meshy builds multimodal foundation models for AI-powered 3D generation, turning text and images into production-ready 3D assets for games, film and 3D printing. Founded by Ethan Hu, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT, Meshy serves more than 15 million registered users worldwide. In July 2026, the company raised nearly $400 million in a Series B round at a $1.5 billion valuation, the largest round to date in AI 3D. Learn more at meshy.ai.

SOURCE Meshy

The standalone institutional venue brings liquidity discovery, standardized loan-level data and privacy-preserving workflows to a private credit market projected to reach $3.4 trillion by 2030

NEW YORK, Sept. 30, 2026 — Percent, the platform powering modern private credit markets through access, liquidity and data, today unveiled PCTX, a standalone electronic trading venue purpose-built for institutional private credit. Operating separately from Percent.com, PCTX is designed specifically for institutional investors and managers to access liquidity, evaluate assets and transact in directly originated private credit more efficiently.

The U.S. private credit market is projected to outpace U.S. high yield bonds and leveraged loans and reach $3.4 trillion outstanding by 2030, yet loan-level trading still occurs largely through bilateral transactions coordinated over email, spreadsheets and phone calls. As the market grows, the lack of standardized documentation, trading conventions and settlement systems can constrain price discovery, portfolio rebalancing and liquidity management. PCTX brings discovery, negotiation, documentation and settlement into a single electronic workflow, creating a more structured way for institutions to find counterparties and transact.

“Private credit has become a major asset class, but the systems for finding liquidity and trading assets have not kept pace,” said Prath Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Percent. “PCTX is the first and only electronic trading venue created specifically for private credit, giving institutional market participants a more efficient way to seek loan-level liquidity without sacrificing the privacy that defines the asset class. Even when a manager has no intention of selling an asset, the ability to source a credible mark from another qualified institution can provide additional insight into how the market should value that asset. That kind of price discovery simply hasn’t existed at scale in private credit.”

PCTX serves private credit asset managers, direct lenders, insurance companies, banks, family offices and other institutional market participants. Its tiered visibility model allows users to identify potential assets and counterparties without immediately revealing sensitive information, with greater access to loan-level data and identity provided as a potential transaction progresses.

The venue will support individual loan and loan portfolio indications of interest, BWICs and OWICs, adapting trading protocols familiar to institutional fixed-income markets for private credit. PCTX is designed around traditional, directly originated loans and the workflows institutions already use. Loan information can be added manually, through spreadsheets or through direct integrations with portfolio management systems, while PCTX supports the process through documentation, settlement instructions and servicing transitions. The venue is live and at the time of launch over a dozen managers, representing $250 billion in private credit AUM, have already signed up.

After eight years of building in private credit, PCTX marks the next step in Percent’s evolution, extending that experience into a venue designed to support a more connected and efficient institutional market.

Disclaimer: PCTX is operated by Cadence Group, Inc. d/b/a Percent Technologies (“Percent Technologies”). PCTX does not permit or facilitate transactions in securities, does not provide brokerage or investment advisory services, and is not registered as a broker-dealer, investment adviser, national securities exchange or alternative trading system. PCTX permits only preliminary, non-binding indications of interest concerning eligible private credit assets that are not securities.

About PCTX
PCTX is a standalone electronic trading venue purpose-built for institutional private credit. Built and operated by Percent, PCTX is designed specifically for institutional investors and managers to access liquidity, evaluate assets and transact in directly originated private credit more efficiently. The venue brings discovery, negotiation, documentation and settlement into a single electronic workflow, creating a more structured way for institutions to find counterparties and transact in privately negotiated individual loans and loan portfolios. For additional information, please visit www.pctx.com.

About Percent
Percent is unlocking private credit by enabling efficient access, liquidity optionality, and data for all market participants. Through its digital primary issuance and secondary markets platform, Percent provides all deal counterparties with a unified environment to source, structure, distribute, service and trade private credit assets. Founded in 2018, Percent has facilitated billions in private credit transaction volume — bringing transparency and standardization to a historically fragmented asset class. For additional information, please visit www.percent.com.

SOURCE Percent

With $8.8M in funding led by Norwest, new Know Your Agent (KYA) platform empowers
companies to confidently do business with agents

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2026 — Beltic, the company building agent verification infrastructure, today emerges from stealth with $7.3 million in Seed funding led by Norwest, with participation from Restive Ventures, Oxford Seed Fund, and Collide Capital, who also led a $1.5 million pre-seed round that included Latitud Ventures, Positive Ventures, and other notable angels. This latest round will fuel Beltic’s mission to give businesses the confidence to trust AI agents to act on their behalf. Beltic provides the infrastructure to verify agents and authorize them to take action, creating a safe foundation for the agentic economy.

“As money moves increasingly in real time, identity and trust infrastructure has to keep pace. Beltic is building the verification layer for that future. One that can establish trust instantly, programmatically and portably across businesses, financial institutions and, increasingly, autonomous agents,” said Jordan Leites, Principal at Norwest. “Isha and Mike have the rare combination of domain expertise and ambition to define this category, and we’re excited to partner with them.”

As agents begin initiating transactions on businesses’ behalf, merchants, payment providers, financial institutions and card networks need a reliable way to verify that each agent is authorized. This is the foundation of “know your agent” (KYA), the agentic equivalent of “know your customer” (KYC). Without it, AI guardrails have nothing reliable to verify against. Building this trust layer is as urgent as building the payment rails themselves.

“For decades, a large part of risk management was asking and verifying, ‘are you human?’,” said Isha Bhatnagar, Beltic CEO and co-founder, and former Coinbase head of product for global regulatory experience. “Agents can already gather information on people’s behalf. The next opportunity is letting them act autonomously, but the safeguards built to protect humans and businesses have become the barrier. Beltic verifies both the agent and the transaction, so companies can safely accept agent traffic and send agents into the world.”

Legacy systems built for human traffic will break under agent traffic. At scale, every transaction requires a new layer of verification: identifying the agent, verifying the entity behind it, and determining whether each action is authorized — all in real time.

“Stakes are even higher when there are no humans in the loop and thousands of transactions per second. One bad decision will not become one bad outcome; it becomes thousands, before anyone notices,” said Farhan Afsahi, Beltic’s CTO. “AI-native isn’t a label: AI-native agent verification requires an AI-native verification stack. We built our whole infrastructure to set the standards for the agentic economy.”

As part of that effort, Beltic is spearheading verification for secure agent-to-agent transactions. “Most people envision a simple chain, where a human authorizes an agent and that agent acts, but the reality is recursive,” Isha explained. “Agents call other agents, orchestrate further agents beneath them, and hand work to systems they do not own. Each handoff is a delegation event, and risks and assumptions reset in each instance. Inherited trust without verification is simply assumed trust.”

Beltic’s platform works on both sides of a transaction, at the scale and speed today’s most innovative companies demand. This approach is enabled by the founding team’s unique combination of identity, payments, and data expertise:

• Isha spent six years at Coinbase building the identity and onboarding infrastructure behind 50 million-plus users and its first institutional clients.
• Co-founder Mike Allan previously founded Atar (acq. Porto Seguro, one of the largest insurance companies in LatAm), a banking-as-a-service provider that scaled across Brazil’s payments and core banking systems.
• CTO Farhan Afsahi co-founded Verifiet, which Beltic acquired in 2025, giving the company a global entity data infrastructure platform spanning global jurisdictions and more than 500 million entities.

“Every enterprise is asking us some version of the same question,” said Mike. “How do I know this is really my customer’s agent, how do I know it’s allowed to take this action, and how do I stop the bad ones without blocking the good ones? That’s the exact problem we built Beltic to answer. No matter what rails a company is running on, our platform keeps transactions, and the businesses behind them, safe. Getting this right is what unlocks everything else.”

Beltic is now partnering with a select group of companies at the forefront of agentic commerce and payments. Design partners will get early access to Beltic’s infrastructure and help shape the standards for how agents transact. Interested companies can reach the team at [email protected].

About Beltic
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, Beltic builds agent verification infrastructure. The company’s platform verifies the identity, authority, and transactional legitimacy of AI agents in real time, enabling them to safely accept and deploy agentic traffic across any protocol or payment rail. Beltic is backed by Norwest, Restive Ventures, Collide Capital, Oxford Seed Fund, Latitud Ventures, Positive Ventures and notable angels. Learn more at https://beltic.com/.

Media contact:
[email protected] 

SOURCE Beltic

Trilogy Equity Partners leads the $11.7 million round, with participation from a16z speedrun, BMW i Ventures and Accel

SEATTLE, Sept. 30, 2026 — Kanu AI today announced $11.7 million in funding led by Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from a16z speedrun, BMW i Ventures, and Accel. Founded just over a year ago, Kanu AI has more than doubled its revenue in each quarter since launch and now serves enterprises across a range of verticals, including commercial real estate, insurance, financial services, and technology.

A company’s most valuable intelligence rarely exists in software alone: it lives in how employees interpret data, make decisions, and drive outcomes. That judgment is often trapped in people’s heads, inboxes, spreadsheets and one-off work. Employees repeat the work, but the company’s systems do not learn from it, and the organization as a whole never compounds it.

Kanu AI automatically captures an enterprise’s intelligence and turns it into production-grade software. Staff members show Kanu AI how they work and connect the systems they already use. Kanu then builds those workflows into operational software in the customer’s cloud. Teams across the organization can use these workflows safely and predictably, with software that adapts as their work changes.

“Companies have spent decades buying software built around someone else’s idea of how they should work,” said Karan Grover, Founder and CEO of Kanu AI. “Instead of renting generic intelligence from another vendor, companies can use Kanu to turn their own data, judgment, and operating expertise into an asset they own, and compound it across the organization.”

For one national customer, Kanu AI reduced an analysis process that previously took up to eight weeks across PDFs, email, spreadsheets, CRM data, and GIS systems down to under 10 minutes. The customer is on track to cut software costs by more than $1 million this year and generate millions in additional revenue by year’s end.

Built for How Enterprises Actually Deploy AI

Kanu is designed to operate within the security, governance, and operating realities of the modern enterprise:

• Runs inside the customer’s cloud and security layer. Data stays with the customer, accessed via existing permissions and policies. Model choice, logic, and outputs are all under the customer’s control.
• Stays current. When a workflow changes, Kanu’s software adapts along with it. All it takes is for one person to teach Kanu something for the entire organization to benefit the same day. No rebuilds or rollouts, or another internal tool becoming obsolete.
• Shows its work. Every output can be opened to inspect what Kanu read, the information it used, how it interpreted that information, and why it reached its conclusion. It is a complete path, from source to decision.
• Is collaborative. Where review and judgment are required, Kanu’s workflows can include human review and approval checkpoints.

Enterprise buyers have moved beyond asking what AI can do. They are asking what can operate within their governance, data, and security requirements and become more valuable as their organization uses it. Kanu is designed for that standard.

“Top of every enterprise leader’s list is how to leverage AI to truly enhance their business performance in an enterprise-worthy fashion,” said Chuck Stonecipher, Managing Director of Trilogy Equity Partners. “Kanu AI’s solution uniquely answers that question.”

“We are strong believers in Kanu AI’s vision for the future: where code is a commodity but doesn’t feel like a commodity,” said Josh Lu, GM and Partner at a16z speedrun. “Kanu is creating this future by enabling generated workflows to be truly production-grade: stable, scalable and secure.”

“With Kanu AI, we see the emergence of a foundational technology for enterprise software,” said Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures. “The team is tackling one of the hardest and most valuable problems in the industry: giving organizations the ability to safely and reliably ship workflows without relying on long, manual engineering cycles.”

Kanu is available today through AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace. The company is hiring across engineering and business roles.

About Kanu AI

Kanu AI turns how an organization works into software workflows the organization owns. Deployed inside the customer’s own cloud and security layer, Kanu learns from the company’s data, expertise, and approved work, then builds and maintains systems that produce finished outcomes. Every result is inspectable and every consequential step remains under human control. Other vendors sell companies’ software. Kanu builds them an asset they own. Kanu AI is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit getkanu.com.

Media Contact
Mary Magnani, CodePR
[email protected]

SOURCE Kanu AI

The platform’s fourth offering, Arlington Industrial, brings the platform to approximately $225 million in total investment volume across three asset classes

Lightstone DIRECT has met every targeted monthly distribution to date

NEW YORK, Sept. 30, 2026 — Lightstone DIRECT, a real estate investment platform built for high-net-worth individuals searching for institutional-quality opportunities without institutional barriers, today announced the opening of Arlington Industrial. With this announcement, less than a year after launch, Lightstone DIRECT deals account for roughly $225 million in total investment volume across four offerings.

The new investment in Arlington, Texas, follows offerings in Abernathy Industrial Park in South Carolina, Hidden Lakes Apartments in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and OKC Outlets in Oklahoma City. Arlington Industrial is the platform’s second industrial investment, expanding Lightstone DIRECT’s offerings across industrial, multifamily, and retail.

Arlington Industrial is a six-building shallow bay industrial property totaling 170,390 square feet of infill space at the midpoint between Dallas and Fort Worth. The property is 95% leased to 24 small business tenants that keep a metroplex running, including HVAC contractors, local distributors and light manufacturers.

Arlington Industrial follows closely on OKC Outlets, which opened to investors in August 2026 and marked the platform’s first move beyond industrial and multifamily. The open-air center is the only outlet center within more than 100 miles of Oklahoma City, currently 97.5% occupied. Leveraging institutional knowledge in this space, Lightstone built and recapitalized a 22-property outlet portfolio to Simon Property Group for $2.33 billion in 2010.

Since beginning distribution in April, the platform has met every targeted monthly distribution. “We’re delighted to offer accredited investors the opportunity to invest alongside us and benefit from our 40-year track record,” said Mitchell Hochberg, President of Lightstone. “It’s gratifying to see that the diversity of our offerings across industrial, retail, and multifamily asset classes, is resonating with investors.”

By design, Lightstone DIRECT offers a higher degree of alignment with accredited investors than many other real estate investing platforms. Lightstone closes each Lightstone DIRECT acquisition on its own balance sheet before offering interests to accredited investors, who subsequently redeem a portion of Lightstone’s equity, and the firm maintains a minimum 20% equity investment in every transaction, investing its own capital alongside individual investors.

“Small-bay industrial is increasingly difficult to build economically in Dallas–Fort Worth, yet demand for this type of space remains robust,” said Greg Fink, Chief Investment Officer of Lightstone. “We acquired Arlington at a meaningful discount to estimated replacement cost in a market where we believe competitive supply is difficult to replicate, creating a compelling basis for the investment.”

Lightstone acquired the property for approximately 45% below its estimated replacement cost. The acquisition comes as Dallas–Fort Worth led all U.S. industrial markets in net absorption in the first half of 2026 (per JLL and Newmark), while only a sliver of new construction across the metroplex is shallow bay.

ABOUT LIGHTSTONE DIRECT

Lightstone DIRECT is a real estate investment platform built for high-net-worth individuals. The platform brings qualified investors the opportunity to partner with a $12B AUM real estate owner/operator. Lightstone DIRECT provides accredited investors access to carefully underwritten, single-asset multifamily, industrial, and commercial assets that have passed Lightstone’s rigorous due diligence process, approved by Lightstone’s investment committee – the same transactions Lightstone pursues with its own capital. https://lightstonedirect.com.

ABOUT LIGHTSTONE

Lightstone, founded by David Lichtenstein, is one of the most diversified privately held real estate companies in the United States. Headquartered in New York City, Lightstone is active in 28 states, developing, managing, and investing across residential, hospitality, commercial, and retail real estate. Its $12 billion-plus portfolio spans 243 properties, including over 25,000 multifamily units and more than 16 million square feet of industrial, life sciences, and commercial space. Since 2004, Lightstone has realized 56 investments at a 27.6% net IRR and a 2.54x net equity multiple. The firm employs more than 645 people across the country.

SOURCE Lightstone DIRECT

One Year After Receiving SEC Approval, Texas Stock Exchange Has Unparalleled Resources to Compete

DALLAS, Sept. 30, 2026 — TXSE Group, the parent company of the Texas Stock Exchange, today announced the successful completion of its third-round financing, expanding its capital position to $430 million. The milestone falls on the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of TXSE’s Form 1 application to operate as a national securities exchange. TXSE is the first national securities exchange established in Texas, and the only exchange in the state with operations, infrastructure and active primary listings.

“Real competition for primary listings is here, and it is here to stay,” said TXSE Group Chairman and CEO James H Lee. “Our historic capital position is an institutional validation of the demand for a legitimate third listing alternative, and that is exactly what we have deployed. While the legacy equities exchanges prioritize fintech, prediction and energy markets, mortgages, data businesses and other pursuits, TXSE is solely focused on being the best exchange operator in the world. Our fortress-like capital position gives us the resources to deliver on our mission to improve conditions in the public equity markets by aligning with and advocating for issuers.”

The financing round leaves TXSE Group with a record cash surplus and the most capital ever raised by a new exchange. TXSE Group’s existing owners accounted for more than 75 percent of the third-round raise, reflecting deep and unwavering conviction from the largest financial institutions on earth. Major equity holders include BlackRock, the world’s largest institutional manager; Charles Schwab, the world’s largest retail organization; Citadel Securities, the world’s largest global liquidity provider; as well as J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America, three of the largest global investment banks, among the other leading institutions that include:

• Individuals or entities that direct or control public companies across multiple industries of various sizes, with a combined market capitalization in excess of $4 trillion;
• Nine of the 10 largest liquidity providers, representing more than 85% of total U.S. equity order flow; and
• Many of the world’s largest sponsors, representing more than 1,000 ETFs with a combined AUM of $11 trillion, or two-thirds of the more than $16 trillion of total capitalization of ETF assets in the U.S.

“Our record cash surplus further positions TXSE to substantially increase its capital reserves while providing the flexibility for strategic initiatives,” added TXSE Group Chief Financial Officer Jaime Gow. “We look forward to leveraging our capital position to accelerate our scaling of primary listings and continuous trading.”

Completion of the funding round follows a surge in announcements of corporate and ETF primary listings from across the United States. In the last 20 days alone, established public companies representing a combined $115 billion of market value have announced moves to the Texas Stock Exchange off the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market.

About the Texas Stock Exchange

Texas Stock Exchange LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of TXSE Group, is a fully integrated, electronic, national securities exchange headquartered and incorporated in Texas. Backed by many of the largest financial institutions and liquidity providers in the world, TXSE is purpose-built to bring real competition to corporate listings and expand access to America’s public markets. With issuer alignment and transparency at its core, TXSE serves as a global listing and trading venue for both public companies and the growing universe of exchange-traded products. For more information, visit us at www.txse.com, on LinkedIn, or on X.

Contact info
[email protected]

SOURCE TXSE Group Inc.

Investment round led by industrial leader International Paper, alongside other new investors Cerity Partners, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Thayer Investment Partners

RALEIGH, N.C., Sept. 30, 2026 — Relay, the system of action for physical operations, today announced it has raised $36 million in new funding, bringing total capital raised to over $90 million. Relay’s latest funding round, which was significantly oversubscribed, represents a powerful alignment among industry leaders with Relay’s vision for the future of frontline work: one that is safer, better connected, and empowered with the spoken intelligence of its workers.

As a signal of Relay’s growing leadership in industrial digital transformation, the round was led by International Paper, a Fortune 500 leader in sustainable packaging solutions, with more than 125 years of manufacturing experience. Other new investors include clients of Cerity Partners, a nationally recognized wealth and investment management firm with over $200 billion in assets under management which also manages venture investments for Fortune 500 companies, Harmonic Growth Partners, a leading expansion-stage investor that pairs experienced investors with successful former venture-backed CEOs to help management teams navigate the challenges of scale, and Thayer Investment Partners, who partners with corporate leaders representing many of the world’s top hospitality brands. Earlier lead investors G2 Venture Partners and Wind River Ventures also increased their investments in this round.

“What makes this round special isn’t simply the capital being raised – it’s the alignment with leaders from the industries we serve on how Relay can help them digitally transform their physical operations,” said Chris Chuang, CEO and Co-Founder of Relay. “International Paper understands Relay not just from an investor standpoint, but from the perspective of a customer witnessing the transformational value Relay delivers across its highly demanding industrial environments. Similarly, Thayer brings perspective from multiple leading hotel brands that already run Relay across thousands of properties. It’s a powerful endorsement when customers aren’t just buying your system but are also betting on the company behind it.”

Earning the Right to Serve the Frontlines

Companies have invested billions digitizing physical operations, yet frontline workers remain underserved with analog tools or technology designed for the desk rather than the harsher realities of physical operations. Frontline teams operate production lines, maintain equipment, clean hotel rooms, care for patients, respond to emergencies, and keep complex facilities running – activities that are often incompatible, and sometimes dangerous, with interacting and entering data on a screen.

Some of the most valuable operational knowledge lives in what workers say over their radios, not what is typed or logged into MES, CMMS, PMS, or other static reporting systems built to digitize workflows. In fact, according to recent research from Relay of 500 manufacturing professionals, 57 percent say their most important operational communication happens out loud, in person. Only 17 percent said almost everything frontline workers notice and flag ends up in a system, log, or formal report. Relay calls what slips through signal evaporation. And that gap has a meaningful cost, with 79 percent saying communication breakdowns cause delays, rework, or missed handoffs at least a few times a month.¹

With Relay, workers simply continue communicating how they have for decades — pick up a radio, wear it during their shift, and push to talk. But behind that familiar interaction is a robust system that combines the power of cloud communications, AI, real-time translation, location awareness, and automated workflows – all packaged in modern, durable, next-gen hardware built specifically for the frontlines.

“We run complex and demanding industrial operations, where strong communications isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s foundational,” said Keith Townsend, Group Vice President, Packaging Solutions North America, International Paper. “Relay has proven it can deliver clear, dependable communications in extremely loud and challenging industrial environments. Relay goes beyond communications to improve shift transitions, strengthen operating processes, accelerate responses to safety and maintenance alerts, and connect frontline insights into operational systems. We invested because we envision Relay as an important part of our modern industrial technology stack.”

“Thayer has a unique vantage point on hospitality technology, as our investment partners represent many of the world’s leading hospitality companies,” said Chris Hemmeter, Managing Partner at Thayer. “Relay is increasingly becoming a standard in hospitality, particularly in more complex and demanding luxury hotel, resort, and casino properties. With Relay’s AI-powered system, teams are safer, more connected, and ultimately more effective at delivering exceptional guest experiences.”

Accelerating the Next Chapter

As enterprises accelerate investments in automation and AI, Relay believes competitive advantage will increasingly depend on how effectively organizations link machine intelligence with the knowledge of the people driving the physical actions required in their operations. The new funding will accelerate Relay’s software and AI platform capabilities – including its insights and agentic layer that will allow teams to query their shift data and act on it – worker safety solutions, integrations with other enterprise systems, next-generation frontline hardware, expansion across the industrial and hospitality markets, and continued hiring across its product and go-to-market teams.

Relay serves hundreds of thousands of frontline workers and works with approximately 10 percent of the Fortune 500, including multiple companies with over 10,000 users on Relay. Among its enterprise customers, Relay maintains 99 percent gross revenue retention and 130 percent net revenue retention.

Relay’s growth has also earned consistent market recognition. The company has appeared on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for three consecutive years and was recently named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America (#830) for the third consecutive year.

About Relay

Relay is the system of action for physical operations, serving the 80 percent of the world’s workforce that doesn’t sit behind a desk – the frontlines. Relay captures what the frontline says and does, and turns it into action in the systems they already run, helping teams unlock operational intelligence and improve their communications, safety, and productivity. Relay’s system combines its powerful software and AI platform with purpose-built next-gen hardware, to better connect frontline teams, overcome language barriers with support for 35 languages, and deliver rapid ROI for its customers. Relay is used by nearly 10 percent of the Fortune 500, and processes over one billion data points weekly from the nearly 10,000 sites it’s deployed across in sectors like manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare, and more. For more information, visit relaypro.com.

Media Contact: [email protected]

Q&A

Where does critical operational communication happen in manufacturing facilities?

Critical information moves through verbal conversations because of the speed and physical demands of frontline work, where gloves defeat touchscreens, noise defeats phones, and there is no desk. In fact, Relay found 82% of manufacturing professionals still relay information manually. While written records matter, they hold the closure rather than the human context behind it, so the challenge is capturing that spoken information before it disappears once the conversation ends.

Why do manufacturers still need frontline context after digitizing their operations?

Digital systems show what changed, but workers understand why, and bringing that frontline context into the operational record links machine data to what actually happened on the shift. Relay customer data found roughly 80% of what happens on a floor is never recorded anywhere, even in operations that bought purpose-built software for the job. As experienced people retire and AI reaches the floor, that context becomes not a complement to machine data, but what makes it interpretable.

How can manufacturers ensure critical context and data are being saved?

The practical first step is to find out how much is being lost today. Every operation has an Evaporation Rate, the share of its spoken reality that never reaches the right person in time to act, and most have never measured theirs. Voice-based communication tools that let workers talk naturally while automatically converting those conversations into structured, searchable records address this gap. Relay’s approach preserves the speed factory workers need while ensuring the context behind an issue or update doesn’t disappear once the conversation ends.

¹ Survey of 500 U.S. manufacturing professionals at organizations with 500 or more employees, conducted by Dynata on behalf of Relay, August 2026.

SOURCE Relay Inc.