The Miami-based company is building the most useful small business finance agent and banking platform in the world, with participation from Codie Sanchez, Mark Pincus,  and others.

MIAMI, Oct. 23, 2026 — BOB AI Holdings Corp. (“BOB”), the AI finance employee for small business, today announced it has raised $5.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Mischief (founder of Plaid, Zak Perret), with funding from Peter Thiel and participation from Codie Sanchez, Mark Pincus, Karman Ventures, and a group of additional investors and operators. BOB will use the capital to expand its product, grow its team in Miami, and bring a free AI finance agent to more of the small business owners who keep the American economy running.

The seed round brings together investors who share a conviction that small businesses deserve the same caliber finance department g that large companies take for granted. Mischief led the round, and Peter Thiel joined as a backer alongside Codie Sanchez, the investor and operator known for championing Main Street business ownership.

The funding follows BOB’s private beta launch in September 2026 and will support three priorities: deepening the product’s financial capabilities, scaling customer onboarding, and growing BOB’s team in Miami.

BOB is an AI finance employee that works alongside small business owners to handle the annoying but necessary financial work that usually eats their nights and weekends. Owners talk to BOB the way they would talk to a trusted bookkeeper or CFO, over WhatsApp, text message, Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or the BOB app. BOB keeps the books, sends invoices, accepts payments, holds funds in a deposit account, and helps owners see where their cash is headed so they can make decisions with confidence.

BOB’s long-term goal is to be the most useful banking product in the world, and a banking product specifically built for this new world of AI agents, robots, and drones. But they are getting started by building the most useful and safe financial agent for small business owners. And instead of handing owners another dashboard to learn, BOB just does the work for them and communicates in plain language.

BOB’s wedge has been particularly effective because the company is laser-focused on small business owners who have largely been underserved by the wave of financial technology built over the last five to ten years. Many of those products were designed for the general market or for enterprise finance teams, and they assume the owner has time, training, or staff to run them. BOB starts from the opposite assumption. The owner of a roofing company, a restaurant, or a local services firm should be able to get real financial help without hiring a department to get it.

“Small business owners have been an afterthought for most of the financial technology built over the last decade,” said Adam Wininger, CEO of BOB. “They are running the business, doing the work, and then staying up late trying to make sense of their books. We built BOB to take that work off their plate entirely. Our goal is simple: to be the most useful banking platform in the world, and this funding lets us put our free CFO agent, BOB, in the hands of many more owners.”

“We invest in infrastructure that becomes indispensable, and a financial layer for autonomous agents is one of the clearest examples we’ve seen,” said Dustin Moring, General Partner at Mischief. “BOB is attacking an immense market at the exact moment AI is moving from advising on transactions to executing them. We’re proud to lead this round and back Adam and the team as they build the foundation agent banking will run on.”

About BOB

BOB AI Holdings Corp. is a Miami-based company building BOB, the AI finance employee and banking platform for small business. BOB handles bookkeeping, invoicing, payments, and cash flow for small business owners through the channels they already use, including WhatsApp, text message, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. BOB’s mission is to build the world’s most useful banking product in the world. Learn more at joinbob.ai. Disclaimer: BOB AI Holdings Corp is a financial technology company, not a bank.

Media contact

Joel Strauss – [email protected] 

SOURCE BOB AI Holdings Corp

HONG KONG, Oct. 23, 2026 — New holding group aims to connect technology and industry through investment for the long term.

Technology investor Yuan Liu founded Lynshaw Group with his own capital in September 2026 as an international technology investment holding group. The group’s stated strategy combines capital management, technology investment, corporate ownership, industrial operations and international business cooperation.

The group’s long-term investment plans focus on five sectors: artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors, computing infrastructure, robotics and energy. These sectors span intelligent technologies, core hardware, infrastructure and real-world applications. AI encompasses the technologies that enable intelligent systems, semiconductors provide the hardware foundation for advanced computing, and computing infrastructure supports the deployment and operation of computing resources. Robotics connects digital intelligence with the physical world, while energy underpins the digital economy and industrial systems.

These fields are increasingly interconnected. AI relies on semiconductors for processing power, while computing systems depend on supporting infrastructure such as data centres. Bringing intelligent technologies into industrial settings also requires robotics, automation equipment and manufacturing systems to work together. The investment thesis therefore extends beyond technological breakthroughs to how technology enters real business activity and creates economic value, including the infrastructure and industrial capabilities that support commercialisation.

Hong Kong as a Planned Strategic Hub

The group’s strategic blueprint envisages Hong Kong as a centre for capital management and strategic coordination. It plans to build a regional business network linking mainland China, the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore over time.

Under the proposed regional model, Hong Kong would support capital management and corporate coordination through its international financial markets, legal framework and cross-border professional services. Mainland China offers an extensive manufacturing base and technology industry resources, while the United States is a major source of innovation in AI, semiconductors and other frontier technologies. The United Kingdom and Singapore would provide connections to European and Asia-Pacific markets, respectively. Developing this network would require organisational structures and operating capabilities suited to each market’s commercial and regulatory environment.

Founder Background

Lynshaw Group founder Yuan Liu’s professional background spans technology industry research and cross-border capital markets.

According to his published professional biography, Liu worked in technology investment and strategic planning at Blue Canyon Holdings Pte Ltd in Singapore from 2018 to 2019, focusing on semiconductors, general-purpose computing and intelligent robotics. From 2020 to 2021, he worked at Marina Strategic Advisory Pte Ltd, a Singapore technology strategy consultancy he co-founded. From 2021 to 2024, he worked in cross-border investment and financing in Hong Kong. His broader professional experience also includes acquisitions and corporate structuring. He served as chairman of Hong Kong-listed Zhong Ju Investment Group Limited from March to June 2026.

A Capital Model for the Long Term

Founded with Liu’s own capital, Lynshaw Group is pursuing a holding-company model oriented towards long-term ownership. Such a structure can help align capital planning with the development cycles of individual businesses and support investment across multiple market cycles.

Long-term ownership requires disciplined capital allocation. Technological change, market competition, operating efficiency and the cost of capital remain key determinants of long-term value in technology industries. Industry research, corporate governance and risk controls are therefore central to the development of the holding-company model.

For the newly established group, the next stage of development will require a professional team, clear governance and the capabilities to operate across regions, supported by sustained, systematic research into its five target technology sectors.

Media Contact

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Lynshaw Group

Higgsfield is headquartered in San Francisco and keeps deep roots in Kazakhstan through the Astana Hub. It was co-founded by Alex Mashrabov, Kazakhstani AI engineer Yerzat Dulat, and Mahi De Silva, marking a massive milestone for AI in Kazakhstan as the first AI unicorn.

“Every brand, studio and creator now needs more visual content than traditional production can supply, and a new category is forming to meet that demand. TCV has backed iconic companies that have transformed media, and NVIDIA has powered every generation of our platform. With leaders from compute to media development we’re well positioned to lead this new frontier” said Alex Mashrabov, Co-Founder and CEO of Higgsfield.

“Over the past 30 years at TCV, we’ve backed platforms that have changed how people create and consume media around the world, including Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, ByteDance, Electronic Arts and now Higgsfield,” said Jay Hoag, Founding General Partner at TCV. “We believe Alex and the Higgsfield team are delivering on a powerful vision at a pace of product velocity and market adoption that we have rarely seen: a radically faster, professional-grade and AI-native mechanism for creators, brand marketers and agencies alike to turn ideas into images and video,” said Neil Tolaney, General Partner at TCV.

Higgsfield is defining a new category, AI-native visual media: images, video and film conceived, produced and adapted on AI platforms. Brands and agencies, including Fortune 500 companies, use it to turn a single campaign concept into up to 100 ad variants for different markets and platforms. Higgsfield has more than 40 million users in 238 countries and territories across North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, with the United States as its largest single market and Europe as its largest region by usage.

Eighteen months after launch, Higgsfield crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue in September. Enterprise is its fastest-growing business, growing more than 100% month over month, and revenue under contract from business customers has grown tenfold since June. Independent commercial spend data from Ramp identifies Higgsfield as the fastest-growing image and video AI vendor, capturing market share from competing platforms faster than any other provider in the space.

The investment comes as spending on visual content rises and the way it is made changes. WPP Media forecasts global advertising revenue will reach $1.3 trillion in 2026, and names AI as a primary driver of that growth. In the U.S., the IAB expects digital video ad spending to exceed $80 billion this year, with nearly two-in-three buyers now using GenAI for digital video creative, up from half in 2025.

Higgsfield serves three sectors that run on visual content: marketing & advertising, entertainment and the creator economy. Each is a large and growing market, and in each, demand for visual content is outpacing the capacity of traditional production. Because demand for content now grows with the number of audiences a business wants to reach, Higgsfield’s market continues to expand as personalization becomes standard practice.

Scaling the visual token economy

As AI shifts from training models to running them at scale, Higgsfield expects the next phase to be defined by the applications that turn tokens into the most valuable output. Higgsfield is building that layer for visual AI, bringing leading video, image and audio models together with its proprietary creative technology to turn compute into finished commercial work.

Visual generation earns far more per token than text. Industry benchmarks put generative video’s effective yield at $30 to $150 per million equivalent tokens, compared with $0.15 to $0.60 for text. Commercial visual work is also rarely generated once: a single campaign calls for a first version, variations to test against each other, and adaptations for each market and language.

Higgsfield has become one of the largest AI media platforms in the world, processing 12 trillion tokens across 150 million generations every month.

“AI factories produce intelligence in the form of tokens and the application layer is where those tokens become useful,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of physical AI simulation at NVIDIA. “The collaboration between Higgsfield and NVIDIA across hardware and software is turning compute into creative work for millions of users and hundreds of the world’s largest brands.”

Higgsfield has a long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA across hardware and software.

• Higgsfield has scaled end to end on NVIDIA infrastructure at every stage, from L40 and A40 GPUs through the Hopper and Blackwell generations, and is now expanding to NVIDIA Vera Rubin to meet growing demand.
• Higgsfield leverages NVIDIA Dynamo to securely deploy and scale custom inference workloads on its own GPU infrastructure.
• Kök Börü, Higgsfield’s 15-minute animated short film, was powered by NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra infrastructure. Higgsfield open-sourced the full project and turned it into a free course on Higgsfield Academy, its learning platform for AI filmmaking, where more than 150,000 creators have completed lessons.

The financing will support product development, global infrastructure, hiring and go-to-market expansion.

About Higgsfield

Higgsfield is an AI-native multimedia content creation platform for brands, agencies, studios and professional creators, built for teams that work at professional scale where output quality and consistency matter. The platform has more than 40 million users across 238 countries and territories, with the United States as its largest market. Higgsfield was co-founded by Alex Mashrabov, Kazakhstani AI engineer Yerzat Dulat, and Mahi de Silva. Mashrabov previously co-founded AI Factory, the computer vision company behind Snapchat’s Cameos and face filters, which Snap acquired in 2019. To learn more, visit higgsfield.ai.

SOURCE Higgsfield Inc.

Fourteen new FTSE index ETFs span core bond allocations and targeted exposures, with seven funds at 0.02% and the entire lineup at 0.02% to 0.08%.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 22, 2026 — Corgi Invest today announced the launch of 14 fixed income exchange-traded funds, bringing annual expense ratios as low as 0.02% to a lineup spanning U.S. Treasuries, inflation-protected bonds, aggregate bonds and corporate credit. Seven of the funds carry a two-basis-point annual expense ratio, equivalent to $2 a year for every $10,000 invested, assuming a constant investment value.¹

The launch expands Corgi Invest’s fixed income platform across core portfolio allocations and targeted bond exposures. Seven funds are priced at 0.02%, six at 0.05% and one at 0.08%. The two-basis-point strategies cover broad U.S. Treasuries, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS), aggregate bonds and investment grade corporate bonds, along with selected Treasury and corporate maturity segments.

The new lineup brings substantial expense-ratio differences to several established bond ETF categories. The Corgi FTSE U.S. TIPS Bond ETF (TTTT) is priced at 0.02%, compared with 0.18% for the iShares TIPS Bond ETF (TIP) and 0.03% for the Schwab U.S. TIPS ETF (SCHP). The Corgi FTSE Fallen Angels Bond ETF (ANG) is priced at 0.08%, compared with 0.25% for both the iShares Fallen Angels USD Bond ETF (FALN) and the VanEck Fallen Angel High Yield Bond ETF (ANGL).²

Expense ratios have a direct bearing on the cost of maintaining a fixed income allocation. Investors often use bonds to support retirement spending and other income needs, and fund operating expenses reduce the returns available to meet those objectives. Those costs recur throughout the holding period. Lower expenses reduce that recurring drag, although they do not guarantee better performance or eliminate interest-rate, credit or liquidity risk.

The Corgi FTSE High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HH) carries an annual expense ratio of 0.05%, compared with 0.49% for the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG). At a constant $10,000 investment value, those rates represent approximately $5 and $49 in annual fund operating expenses, respectively.¹ Other low-cost alternatives include the iShares Broad USD High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (USHY) at 0.08% and the State Street SPDR Portfolio High Yield Bond ETF (SPHY) at 0.05%.² The Schwab High Yield Bond ETF (SCYB), at 0.03%, has a lower annual operating expense ratio than HH. SCYB tracks a different ICE cash-pay high-yield index.²

Lower-fee alternatives also exist in Treasury exposures. Vanguard Long-Term Treasury ETF (VGLT) charges 0.03%, compared with 0.05% for Corgi FTSE 20+ Year U.S. Treasury Bond ETF (LTB). Schwab Intermediate-Term U.S. Treasury ETF (SCHR) charges 0.03%, compared with 0.05% for Corgi FTSE 7-10 Year U.S. Treasury Bond ETF (SVTN). VGLT covers maturities over 10 years versus LTB’s 20+ years; SCHR covers 3-10 years versus SVTN’s 7-10 years. These differences can materially affect duration, risk and returns.²

Each of the 14 funds seeks to track its respective FTSE index before fees and expenses. The expanded lineup gives investors and advisors additional ways to select maturity and credit exposures while evaluating ongoing costs. By extending competitive pricing across a broad range of bond strategies, Corgi Invest is making expense discipline a central part of its fixed income offering.

Selected annual expense ratio comparisons

Annual gross operating expense ratios and selected comparable exposures are shown below. Issuer figures were checked October 21, 2026.²

The fourteen fund lineup

About Corgi Invest

Corgi Invest offers exchange-traded funds across fixed income, equity and structured strategies. Corgi Strategies, LLC serves as investment adviser to the funds. Learn more at corgiinvest.com.

Media contact

Corgi Press, [email protected]

Important information

Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing. The prospectus contains this and other information about the Funds and should be read carefully before investing. A copy of the prospectus is available at corgiinvest.com.

Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. There is no guarantee that any Fund will achieve its investment objective. Bond prices generally fall when interest rates rise; longer-duration bonds are typically more sensitive to interest-rate changes. Fixed income investments also involve credit, liquidity, income, call, prepayment and extension risks. Income is not guaranteed.

High yield and fallen angel bonds are below investment grade and involve greater credit and default risk than investment grade bonds. TIPS can decline in value as real interest rates rise, and their income varies with inflation. U.S. government backing applies to eligible underlying securities, not to ETF shares. Funds focused on particular credit ratings or maturity segments may experience risks differently from broader bond funds.

The Funds are non-diversified and may invest more of their assets in fewer issuers, increasing the impact of an issuer’s losses. They are newly organized and have limited or no operating history. An active trading market may not develop or be maintained. Shares trade at market prices, which may differ from net asset value, and are not individually redeemable. Brokerage commissions, bid-ask spreads and other trading costs reduce returns and may be higher for new funds. Index tracking is not guaranteed. One may not invest directly in an index.

FTSE indexes are provided by FTSE Russell. FTSE and related marks belong to their respective owners. The Funds are not sponsored, endorsed, sold or promoted by FTSE Russell or its affiliates. Other third-party fund names and marks are used for identification only.

Corgi Strategies, LLC is the investment adviser. Distributed by Paralel Distributors LLC. The distributor is unaffiliated with Corgi Strategies, LLC. This release is informational only and is not an offer or solicitation; offers are made only by prospectus.

Expense illustrations and comparison notes

1. Dollar illustrations equal the stated annual expense ratio multiplied by a constant $10,000 balance. They assume no changes in investment value or expense ratios and exclude brokerage commissions, bid-ask spreads, taxes, advisory charges and other investor costs. Actual expenses vary. These are not return forecasts or the standardized expense examples in the prospectuses.

2. Comparison sources are issuer websites, fact sheets and prospectuses checked October 21, 2026. Ratios shown are annual gross operating expenses; Corgi estimates are from its October 13, 2026 prospectus. Morningstar prospectus net expense ratios were cross-checked separately for the comparison ETFs. Material differences, fee arrangements and links to both sides of every comparison appear in the following disclosures.

Index differences include maturity eligibility, liquidity screens, issuer caps and weighting. Corgi’s 0+ year indexes can include shorter-maturity securities than indexes with a one-year minimum. ANG uses a FTSE time-weighted index capped at 5% per issuer; FALN uses a Bloomberg 3% capped index and ANGL an ICE 10% constrained index. These differences can materially affect risk and returns.

See the following fund comparison disclosures for fund-specific website and issuer fact-sheet links.

Fund comparison disclosures

Annual gross operating expense ratios, checked October 21, 2026. Each fund seeks its own index results before fees and expenses. This is a selected expense comparison, not a performance comparison or a market-wide lowest-cost claim. Index rules do not describe identical portfolios; actual holdings and returns can differ. m = million; bn = billion.

Important comparison information

Expenses. Corgi ratios are estimated annual operating expenses in the October 13, 2026 prospectus, with no fee-waiver reduction. All ratios exclude commissions, bid-ask spreads, portfolio transaction costs and investor taxes. Lower operating expenses do not guarantee higher returns or lower total ownership costs. Fees may change.

Fee arrangements. AGG waives affiliated acquired-fund fees through June 30, 2027; earlier termination requires written agreement of its trust and adviser. The waiver rounds to 0.00%; gross and net are both 0.03%. ANGL’s adviser pays offering costs until at least September 1, 2027; gross and net operating expenses are both 0.25%. No separate waiver reduction is shown for VGLT, SCHR or SCYB in their issuer fact sheets.

Liquidity and history. Corgi funds are newly organized, non-diversified and have limited history; established peers have longer operating histories. Corgi may have greater concentration risk, and an active market may not develop. ETF shares trade above or below net asset value; spreads and liquidity can worsen during market stress. Shares are not individually redeemable.

Safety and risk. All funds can lose principal. Rising interest rates generally reduce bond prices; longer duration increases sensitivity. Corporate bonds face default and downgrade risk; high yield and fallen angels have greater credit and liquidity risk. Aggregate bonds face mortgage prepayment and extension risk. TIPS face real-rate and inflation risk. ETF shares are not FDIC insured, bank guaranteed or government guaranteed; Treasury backing does not protect ETF shares.

Tax features. Distributions and sale gains may be taxable; treatment varies by holdings, account and investor. Treasury-income state/local treatment can differ from corporate-bond income. Corgi cash creations/redemptions may generate costs and taxable gains versus in-kind transactions; peers may also use cash. No comparative tax advantage is claimed.

Sources. Issuer websites, fact sheets and prospectuses support the gross ratios. Morningstar’s Prospectus Net Expense Ratio field was independently checked October 21, 2026 for the named comparison ETFs; net figures are corroboration, not a substitute for gross expense disclosures. No Morningstar rating or endorsement is claimed.

Consider each fund’s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully. Read its prospectus before investing. Fund-specific websites below provide access to prospectuses and additional information.

Corgi fund websites: SVTN | TNTW | LTB | UB | TTTT | AGGB | IGB | FTN | LIGB | AAAB | BBBB | HH | ANG | GCB

Comparison fund websites / original issuer fact sheets:

AGG (fact sheet) | TIP (fact sheet) | SCHP (fact sheet) | LQD (fact sheet) | SPBO (fact sheet) | HYG (fact sheet) | USHY (fact sheet)

SPHY (fact sheet) | FALN (fact sheet) | ANGL (fact sheet) | VGLT (fact sheet) | SCHR (fact sheet) | SCYB (fact sheet)

Corgi investment adviser: Corgi Strategies, LLC. Distributed by Paralel Distributors LLC, unaffiliated with Corgi Strategies, LLC.

COR206

SOURCE Corgi

Y Combinator startup transforms 100 million fragmented patient records into multimodal training data and reinforcement learning environments for medical AI agents.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 22, 2026 — BioStack, a healthcare technology company, announced today that it’s launching a data infrastructure network to power the next era of medicine. It spans a global footprint across the U.S., India, Brazil, and Argentina with over 100 million de-identified patient records. By connecting fragmented clinical information, BioStack gives AI and biotech companies the high-quality data needed to train models that understand how disease unfolds, how treatments work, and what drives patient outcomes.

The company also announced $9.5 million in seed funding led by Peak XV, Afore Capital, DCVC, Emerson Collective, SV Angel, Verdict Capital, Streamlined Ventures, and Y Combinator. The round will support BioStack’s continued expansion across the United States and international markets, development of its technology platform and growth of its engineering and research teams.

Today, patient histories and other clinical data are often fragmented across hospitals, providers and technology systems, leaving clinicians without a complete picture of a patient’s treatment. BioStack creates workflows that bring together clinical information across disparate health systems and geographies. Connecting notes, labs, imaging, medications, treatments and outcomes, BioStack provides a more comprehensive view of the patient and informs population-level and hospital-level discovery.

“Collecting every event linked to each patient enables a view of what happens at each stage of a patient’s journey.” said Sanat Mishra, co-founder and CEO of BioStack. “We’re building the infrastructure that connects all of the clinical information and makes it useful, both for clinicians making decisions today and for the researchers and AI developers building the future of medicine.”

In addition to creating custom workflows that protect patient privacy and are based on individual provider protocols, BioStack creates proprietary datasets from de-identified data that it collects from each provider system. These datasets can support medical research, drug development and the training and evaluation of healthcare AI models.

It connects biological and clinical data with treatment histories and long-term outcomes. This helps researchers understand what happened to a patient and how different interventions affected their health over time.

BioStack creates a feedback loop between clinical care and medical innovation. As more longitudinal patient information becomes available, researchers and AI developers can gain a richer understanding of disease progression and treatment response. Healthcare providers can benefit from new insights and more personalized approaches to care.

In India, BioStack is helping connect cancer patients with an investigational cancer vaccine program. Patients’ clinical data can support biotech companies’ development efforts, while eligible patients may gain access to highly personalized investigational treatments.

BioStack has combined more than several hundred thousand fragmented X-Rays, MRIs, CT scans with other pathology and clinical records. The resulting dataset provides a powerful resource for training AI agents to help clinicians evaluate treatment options and likely patient outcomes.

“The next frontier of healthcare AI will depend not only on better models, but on access to high-quality, longitudinal data that reflects how patients are treated over time,” said Pushpak Kedia, Vice President, Peak XV. “Sanat and the BioStack team are building critical infrastructure that connects fragmented clinical information and transforms it into a valuable resource for clinicians, researchers and AI developers. We believe BioStack has the potential to become an important data layer for the next generation of medical AI.”

BioStack currently works with hospitals across the U.S., Brazil, India and Argentina, giving the company access to a diverse patient population and healthcare environments. Its platform is designed to support applications including medical AI model development and evaluation, clinical research, disease modeling, biomarker discovery, patient stratification and treatment-response analysis.

About BioStack

BioStack is building the data infrastructure for the next generation of healthcare and medical AI. The company connects fragmented clinical information across healthcare systems to create longitudinal patient records spanning notes, labs, imaging, medications, treatment and outcomes. BioStack de-identifies this information to create proprietary datasets that support healthcare research, biotechnology and the development and evaluation of medical AI. 

BioStack is backed by VC’s including Peak XV, Afore Capital, DCVC, Emerson Collective, SV Angel, Verdict Capital, Streamlined Ventures, and Y Combinator and operates across the U.S., Brazil, India and Argentina. For more information, visit www.getbiostack.com. 

[email protected] 

SOURCE BioStack Platforms, Inc.

LEHI, Utah, Oct. 22, 2026 — Podium, a leader in AI for local businesses, today announced it has surpassed $150 million in AI-specific annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company reached the milestone in just two and a half years. Its original software business took eight years to reach the same mark.

Three years ago, Podium made a company-wide bet on AI agents that work like employees. The company saw an opportunity to fundamentally change how businesses operate across automotive, home services, aesthetics and health.

“We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it. I’d rather do it ourselves,” said Eric Rea, CEO of Podium.

Podium rebuilt its software around that bet. Today, its AI agents answer calls, respond to leads, book appointments, follow up with customers and identify and act on opportunities to grow revenue.

Podium is taking that vision further by building business software around its AI agents. For HVAC, plumbing, electrical and garage door contractors, that means an AI-native field service management system (FSM) that helps schedule jobs, dispatch technicians and grow revenue. In aesthetics, Podium’s electronic medical record system (EMR) helps practices manage patients, book treatments and drive repeat visits. In automotive, agents help dealerships turn more leads into test drives, book service appointments and bring customers back for repeat business.

By connecting its agents directly to the systems businesses use every day, Podium is turning business software into an AI workforce that can take action, serve customers and grow revenue.

Today, more than 20,000 Podium AI agents are deployed and have helped Podium’s customers generate more than $13 billion in revenue.

About Podium

Founded in 2014, Podium builds AI agents that work like employees for local businesses across automotive, home services, aesthetics and health. Podium has been recognized for Best AI Implementation by Inc. Magazine, highlighted by OpenAI for building revenue-driving AI agents for local businesses, and awarded No. 1 AI Agent for Business Operations by G2.

Media Contact

Lydia Dworetzky
[email protected]

SOURCE Podium

Integrated into Lyric’s Virtual Care Operating System, Grace combines intelligent member engagement, proactive health monitoring, clinical assistance, and automated care coordination to turn healthcare intelligence into actionable outcomes.

MCKINNEY, Texas, Oct. 22, 2026 — Lyric Health, a leading provider of virtual-first healthcare technology and services, today announced the launch of Grace, its AI-powered healthcare companion and intelligence layer designed to transform how healthcare organizations engage members, support providers, and coordinate care.

Built directly into Lyric Health’s proprietary Virtual Care Operating System, Grace goes beyond traditional conversational AI. It combines real-time healthcare intelligence, personalized member engagement, clinical workflow assistance, and automated outreach to help identify healthcare needs and initiate meaningful action.

Available through phone and digital chat, Grace connects members to their benefits, helps coordinate care, and supports healthcare organizations in delivering a more proactive, connected experience.

The launch comes as employers and health plans face mounting pressure to improve healthcare accessibility, increase engagement, and control rising medical costs.

Beyond Traditional Healthcare Chatbots: Intelligence That Drives Action

Unlike traditional chatbots that primarily answer questions or direct users to resources, Grace is designed to identify needs, initiate workflows, and coordinate actions across Lyric’s integrated healthcare infrastructure.

Grace’s capabilities include:

• 24/7 Voice and Chat Engagement: Natural, conversational interactions through phone and digital chat, with support for more than 50 languages.
• Personalized Benefits and Member Management: Secure authentication, plan-specific benefits guidance, medical record updates, and dependent management.
• Intelligent Triage, Intake, and Scheduling: Grace gathers relevant health information, helps identify appropriate care options, and enables members to schedule consultations directly through phone or chat.
• Proactive Health Intelligence: An intelligence layer capable of monitoring individual and population health signals, supporting both reactive responses and proactive engagement when intervention opportunities are identified.
• Automated Outbound Engagement: AI-driven outreach supporting post-consultation surveys and member engagement, with expanded workflows for referrals, imaging, laboratory appointments, and care coordination.
• AI-Powered Clinical Assistance: Provider-facing capabilities supporting consultation preparation, real-time transcription, clinical documentation, hundreds of charting functions, and additional patient safety checks.
• 24/7 Knowledge and Support: An intelligent knowledgebase designed to assist members and administrators with benefits, platform functionality, and operational support.

These capabilities establish Grace as more than a member-facing assistant. Grace is designed to serve as an intelligent operational layer connecting members, providers, administrators, and healthcare data.

Turning Healthcare Signals into Actionable Outcomes

Grace represents an important advancement in Lyric Health’s broader strategy to transform healthcare from a reactive model into one that is more proactive, connected, and personalized.

“For years, healthcare technology has focused on giving members access to more information. But information alone doesn’t improve outcomes. What matters is what happens next,” said Rey Colón, Founder and CEO of Lyric Health.

Lyric’s Virtual Care Operating System is designed to aggregate healthcare information, identify meaningful signals, and orchestrate appropriate next steps across the care continuum.

Grace brings that intelligence into action by supporting personalized engagement, automating administrative and clinical workflows, and connecting individuals to the resources and care destinations available through their health benefits.

“We built Grace to go beyond answering questions. Grace can understand a member’s benefits, recognize healthcare needs, assist providers, and initiate the next step in the care journey. Our vision is to identify signals earlier, turn those signals into actionable outcomes, and guide members to the most appropriate care destination—whether that’s virtual-first care or a brick-and-mortar provider,” said Alexandru Trican, Head of AI at Lyric Health.

A More Intelligent Healthcare Experience for Employers and Health Plans

For self-funded employers, third-party administrators, health plans, and healthcare organizations, Grace creates opportunities to improve member engagement, streamline operations, and reduce friction throughout the healthcare experience.

By embedding AI directly into Lyric’s healthcare infrastructure, Grace is designed to help organizations:

• Improve awareness and utilization of healthcare benefits.
• Simplify member onboarding, navigation, and appointment scheduling.
• Reduce administrative workloads through intelligent automation.
• Support providers with clinical documentation and workflow assistance.
• Identify population health signals and opportunities for earlier intervention.
• Strengthen member engagement, satisfaction, and care coordination.
• Guide members toward appropriate, cost-effective care destinations.

Unlike standalone AI solutions that require disconnected integrations and workflows, Grace operates within Lyric’s proprietary healthcare platform, connecting intelligence, engagement, and care delivery.

Building Toward Proactive, Continuous Care

Grace’s launch establishes the foundation for a broader AI-driven healthcare strategy at Lyric Health.

Beyond its current capabilities, Lyric plans to expand Grace’s intelligence layer to monitor business intelligence across clients and their brands, helping organizations identify operational trends, engagement opportunities, and performance insights.

Additional enhancements will extend proactive outreach, preventive care engagement, clinical workflow automation, and coordination across the healthcare ecosystem.

“We believe the future of healthcare isn’t simply virtual care or artificial intelligence. It’s the ability to connect data, intelligence, and care delivery into one coordinated experience,” added Colón. “Grace represents a major step toward making that vision a reality.”

About Lyric Health

Lyric Health is a healthcare technology company delivering a Virtual Care Operating System for employers, third-party administrators, and healthcare organizations. Through its proprietary technology, national provider network, integrated clinical services, and AI-powered engagement capabilities, Lyric Health helps organizations identify healthcare needs, connect members to appropriate care, and improve the overall healthcare experience.

Lyric Health provides access to healthcare services for more than 10 million members through its partner ecosystem.

Learn more: www.getlyric.com

Media Contact
Lyric Health
Isaiah Matthew
469.647.9314
[email protected]

SOURCE Lyric Health

Investment will expand production and innovation as WILDE builds on more than $100 million in sales and a footprint of 35,000+ retail locations nationwide

LEXINGTON, Ky., Oct. 22, 2026 — WILDE, the brand challenging the traditional snack aisle by building salty, craveable snacks from all-natural chicken breast, today announced a $40 million investment from S2G Investments (S2G). The funding will catapult WILDE’s next phase of growth across product innovation, manufacturing, and brand building as the company expands its position in the fast-growing protein snacking category.

The investment comes as WILDE enters its next chapter, with the scale to reinvent what snacking can be on a much bigger stage. The company has surpassed $100 million in sales, expanded to more than 35,000 retail locations nationwide, and recently opened a 130,000-square-foot production facility, the only USDA-regulated salty snack manufacturing facility in the world. The new facility expands WILDE’s production capacity sixfold as the brand continues to grow.

The new capital from S2G will fuel that momentum, enabling WILDE to scale production and extend its nutrient-dense, protein-forward approach beyond its core Protein Chips. Following the recent launch of Protein Crackers, the company has additional snack formats in development designed to bring WILDE’s approach to more occasions and consumers. The investment will also support an evolution of the brand’s visual identity, packaging, and marketing capabilities.

“Building WILDE has never been easy. We started this company to prove that protein snacks don’t have to taste like punishment, and we’ve spent years betting on an idea that didn’t fit neatly into the snack aisle. We stuck with it, built something people crave, and this investment proves that hard work and conviction pay off. Now we have the firepower to go bigger, move faster, and shake up a whole lot more of the snack aisle,” said Jason Wright, Founder and CEO of WILDE.

S2G’s investment comes as consumers increasingly seek snacks with more functional nutritional value, such as protein. For S2G, WILDE’s growth, retail footprint, and expanding product platform create an opportunity to build a larger brand around that shift.

“WILDE has shown you can have better products with high quality ingredients without sacrificing the taste experience that makes people love salty snacks,” said Arthur Chow, Principal, Food & Agriculture at S2G. “Jason created a standout product with Protein Chips, but what excites us most is the opportunity ahead as a snacking platform. Protein Crackers is among my favorite CPG innovations ever. We’re excited to partner with Jason and the team as WILDE scales into a household brand.”

About WILDE
Founded in 2015 by Jason Wright, WILDE is reimagining the salty snack aisle with chips and crackers made from real chicken breast, egg whites, and bone broth. WILDE Protein Chips and Protein Crackers deliver 10+ grams of protein per serving, bringing together satisfying crunch, craveable flavors, and ingredients that set them apart from traditional snacks.

Based in Lexington, Kentucky, WILDE is built on a simple idea: people should be able to enjoy the snacks they love while getting more from every bite. From familiar favorites to new flavor combinations, the brand puts taste at the center of its approach to innovation, creating snacks that surprise people with what they’re made from and keep them coming back for how they taste.

WILDE is available at more than 35,000 retail locations nationwide and online at wildebrands.com.

About S2G Investments
S2G Investments is a multi-asset investment firm focused on scaling durable, market-defining businesses across food & agriculture, energy, and oceans. We provide capital and value-added resources to companies commercializing solutions designed to improve efficiency, resilience, and long-term value across industries powering the global economy. Through fit-for-purpose financing and a systems-focused investment approach, S2G is committed to driving measurable, sustained outcomes with tailored solutions that span late-stage venture, growth equity, structured finance, and infrastructure. To learn more, visit www.s2ginvestments.com or connect with us on LinkedIn.

For media inquiries, samples, or interviews, contact Taylor Hirz, 714-943-5296, [email protected] 

SOURCE WILDE

About the Engage Program

Engage runs a 10-week Enterprise Accelerator Program twice a year, in the spring and fall. Cohort 17 brings together eight startups from across the United States, working in AI, robotics, cybersecurity, logistics, and water reuse. Engage speaks with thousands of startups year-round and only selects a small cohort each season. nicklpass was selected for Cohort 17.

Participants build an enterprise sales playbook with direct access to senior leaders at Engage’s corporate partners, including The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines, The Home Depot, UPS, Goldman Sachs, Chick-fil-A, Georgia-Pacific and more. Engage has backed 122 portfolio companies, which have raised more than $3.1 billion in follow-on capital.

In-Person Sessions and Expected Outcomes

The program is hybrid and brings founders to Atlanta twice during the cohort for in-person sessions with corporate executives and fellow founders. In-person sessions will take place all throughout the end of 2026. nicklpass will use the program to:

• Refine its enterprise go-to-market strategy and sales playbook
• Meet IT, procurement, and finance leaders at Engage partner companies
• Explore pilot engagements with corporate partners

“Being selected for Engage is an honor and a real vote of confidence in what we’re building. Enterprises are adding software faster than ever, especially AI tools, and the teams paying for it deserve clear answers about what they own and what it’s worth. We’re excited to work alongside Engage’s corporate partners to bring that clarity to some of the largest and most important organizations in the country.”

— Sumorwuo Zaza, Co-Founder & CEO of nicklpass

Solving a Problem Every Enterprise Shares

Engage’s corporate partners are moving past AI as a feature and adopting it as infrastructure, with a focus on specific, high-stakes operational problems. Every new AI tool adds another subscription, and large organizations often lack a single view of what they pay for and who actually uses it.

nicklpass gives finance, IT, and procurement teams one place to see every SaaS subscription, track license usage, and assign clear ownership for each renewal. The result is fewer unused seats, fewer surprise renewals, and spending decisions backed by real usage data. By leveraging nicklpass’ usage visibility and bulk purchasing tools, companies have saved, on average, 30% of their software spend.

Learn more about nicklpass by requesting a demo.

The Team Behind nicklpass

nicklpass is built by a distributed team spanning the United States, Mexico, Ukraine, Germany, and the Philippines, bringing together experience in enterprise software, finance operations, product, and design. That range of perspectives shapes a product built for how global companies actually buy and manage software across offices, departments, and time zones.

About nicklpass

nicklpass is a B2B SaaS and AI license management platform based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 2017. It gives companies visibility and accountability over software subscription spend, helping finance, IT, and procurement teams cut waste and manage renewals with confidence.

Learn more at www.nicklpass.com

Media Contact

Bassam Kaado
Business Operations, nicklpass
[email protected] ● 732-947-9060

SOURCE nicklpass