New executive program addresses a critical capability gap: strengthening executive judgment in an era of sustained disruption

WINTER PARK, Fla., Feb. 25, 2026 — Rollins College today announced the launch of The Rick Goings Institute for Management and Executive Leadership, a bold new initiative that builds on Rollins’ long history of pragmatic liberal arts to establish a new standard for advanced leadership and management training.

At a time when senior executives face continuous disruption, from geopolitical realignment and regulatory volatility to technological acceleration and shifting stakeholder expectations, the Institute addresses a capability gap traditional executive education has not fully met: the capacity to exercise sound judgment when established frameworks no longer apply. The Institute will focus on leadership judgment and its impact on business performance, helping senior leaders anticipate market shifts, redesign operating models, and translate strategy into execution in periods of disruption and growth.

“I’ve spent 30 years in strategy consulting and industrial operations,” said Eric Spiegel, former CEO of Siemens USA and partner at Booz Allen Hamilton. “Traditional executive education gives you frameworks. What it doesn’t give you is judgment—the ability to think clearly when the frameworks don’t apply anymore. I’ve believed instinctively for a long time that what’s missing is what a serious liberal arts education develops, but I haven’t been able to articulate it correctly. Now someone finally has.”

The launch of the Institute, made possible by seed capital from the Rick & Susan Goings Foundation, represents the completion of Rollins’ transformative Innovation Triangle, comprising the Institute, the Rollins Museum of Art, and The Alfond Inn, after more than a decade of planning and a total investment of more than $200 million.

The Rick Goings Institute will deliver advanced leadership education for executives who have already established their fundamental leadership capabilities. Its programming will focus on developing the capacity for clear thinking about complex operational problems, recognizing and addressing the market transitions leaders face today, managing technological change, and pivoting organizations for execution and growth.

“We are living through permacrisis — not a temporary disruption but a permanent condition of compounding instability: fracturing political orders, collapsing alliances, and technology eliminating entire categories of certainty,” said Anil Menon, chief executive officer of The Rick Goings Institute and dean of Crummer Graduate School of Business. “Efficiency and scale are no longer sufficient measures of leadership. What’s broken down is judgment — the capacity to read genuinely novel situations, decide when to act, and explain those decisions to stakeholders with fundamentally different worldviews. That is precisely what RGI is built to develop.”

The Institute will launch inaugural programs in 2026, delivering custom corporate offerings and establishing strategic partnerships with organizations in Florida and beyond, including the Young Presidents’ Organization, founded in 1950 by Ray Hickok, a Rollins alumnus. Additional strategic partners and details about specific initiatives will be announced in the weeks ahead.

“Rollins has long held that a liberal arts education cultivates critical thinking grounded in multiple perspectives and thoughtful judgment, preparing graduates to challenge conventions, integrate new ideas and innovations, and lead by forging new paths,” said Brooke Barnett, president of Rollins College. “In recent years, Rollins has advanced a series of initiatives that reinforce our standing as a leading higher education institution not only in Florida, but nationwide. As a cornerstone of our Innovation Triangle, The Rick Goings Institute will further strengthen our ability to educate and develop leaders who are ready to meet this moment by building resilient organizations, strengthening communities, and creating lasting impact.”

The Institute will convene leaders from around the world and across sectors, from business to not-for-profits and government, under the unifying vision that transformative leadership can enable organizations to navigate complexity with ethical clarity and long-term societal impact. It will be built around three key elements: focusing on serious business content from people who have studied and run complex operations; providing extended time with other leaders facing the same challenges; and bringing together leaders from these different sectors, who are looking to collaborate on finding innovative solutions.

“Throughout my career, and especially as CEO of Tupperware Brands, where we empowered a salesforce of millions of entrepreneurs, my focus has been building leadership and an entrepreneurial mindset at every level,” said Rick Goings, chair of the Rollins Board of Trustees. “Leadership is a human endeavor, and the best leaders bring out the strengths of the people around them to drive results. As technological change, geopolitical shifts, and market volatility reshape how organizations operate, it’s more important than ever to recognize the distinct value of human judgment, perspective, and purpose. The Rick Goings Institute will expand access to human-centered leadership approaches that enable organizations to thrive today and in the future.”

For close to a century, Rollins has focused on developing leaders who can think broadly about complex problems. The Rick Goings Institute draws on its approach to pragmatic liberal arts, an educational tradition that blends liberal arts with business, STEM and professional studies to foster critical thinking. Moreover, it has been at the forefront of advancing improved pedagogical approaches, including convening a transformative curriculum conference on the liberal arts in 1931, chaired by John Dewey, to help define the modern purpose of liberal arts education. By applying key elements of this approach, the Institute aims to foster precisely the skills and mindset modern organizational leaders need most: meaningful perspective, advanced systems thinking, and a human-centered approach to leadership.

“Rollins understands that leadership develops over time, through experience, reflection, and the exchange of ideas with others who are doing the work,” said Grant Cornwell, chairman of the advisory board of The Rick Goings Institute and president emeritus of Rollins College. “The Innovation Triangle brings those conditions together in a powerful way. With this launch, Rollins is building a forum where accomplished leaders can sharpen the judgment and human understanding required to guide institutions wisely and responsibly.”

For more information, visit https://rgi.rollins.edu/ 

About Rollins College:

Founded in 1885, Rollins College is Florida’s oldest college. Located in Winter Park, near Orlando, Rollins is consistently ranked as one of the top regional universities in the South by U.S. News & World Report. Rollins offers full-time undergraduate programs in the College of Liberal Arts and undergraduate and graduate degree programs for working professionals and adult learners through its evening program at the Hamilton Holt School of Professional Advancement and Graduate Studies. In addition, its Crummer Graduate School of Business features top-ranked MBA programs. Rollins serves approximately 3,200 degree-seeking students annually.

Media Contact
Davis MacMillan
[email protected]
212-994-7509

SOURCE The Rick Goings Institute for Management and Executive Leadership

After 19 million votes from 225,000+ verified participants, TBD opens to the public.

NEW YORK, Feb. 25, 2026 — TBD, a prediction market protocol designed to measure verified human sentiment, today announced its $3 million seed round and public launch from private beta. The round was led by CMT Digital and ParaFi, with participation from Jump Crypto.

While prediction markets have surged in popularity around elections and sports, TBD is creating an entirely new category: markets built around global human opinion. As AI-generated content and bots flood the internet, it is becoming harder to know what real people actually think. Sentiment data influences everything from business decisions to public policy, yet measuring it accurately online has become increasingly difficult. TBD ensures that every respondent is a uniquely verified human, enabling large-scale, bot-resistant inputs.

“The internet is flooded with synthetic content, and measuring what real people think is an increasingly difficult task,” said Corey Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of TBD. “We are building TBD to discover human sentiment in a digitally native, AI-resistant, and economically sustainable manner.”

The protocol enables individuals and organizations to launch polls answered exclusively by World ID–verified participants. Solana-based prediction markets are simultaneously created, where users can trade on the outcomes. The system aligns economic incentives around real human opinions, making it measurable and market-driven.

“The TBD team has the rare combination of deep mechanism-design thinking and relentless product velocity,” said Sam Hallene, Partner at CMT Digital. “TBD turns verified human sentiment into a market, which we believe will become instrumental as AI erodes trust in traditional data sources.”

TBD’s private beta concluded with over 4,000 markets created, and more than 19 million votes collected from more than 225,000 unique participants globally.

“ParaFi has backed prediction markets since 2018 and believe they are a natural extension of capital markets, bringing transparent, incentive-aligned pricing to future outcomes,” said Anjan Vinod, Managing Director at ParaFi. “We believe TBD thoughtfully extends that model by integrating polling and markets into a single onchain workflow, creating a tighter feedback loop between sentiment and capital. We’re excited to back this team, whose track record of bringing thoughtful, well-executed DeFi products to market gives us conviction in their ability to scale TBD.”

By organizing global opinion into transparent, tradable markets, TBD aims to surface deeper truths about the world and create a new framework for understanding collective belief in the age of AI. Measure what the world really thinks at tbd.vote.

About TBD

TBD is a prediction market protocol for human sentiment. By combining verified global polling with permissionless market creation, TBD enables anyone to measure and trade on real human opinion at scale. The company was founded by Corey Miller and Taehoon Lee, who previously worked together at dYdX.

SOURCE tbd.vote

The fast-growing AI digital adoption platform tackles dual challenges: teaching employees to use AI tools and training AI agents to reliably automate workflows

TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 25, 2026 — Guidde, an AI digital adoption platform, today announced an oversubscribed $50 million Series B funding round led by PSG Equity, with participation from monday.com and past investors: Norwest, Entrée Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Inkberry Ventures. To date, the company has grown to more than 4,500 customers including Anheuser-Busch, Bayer, Nasdaq, Yahoo and SentinelOne, with 3x annual revenue growth for three consecutive years and over 90% customer retention. The investment will help accelerate broad deployment of their platform, designed to train both human employees and AI agents on enterprise software.

Guidde’s platform helps enable organizations to create video-based documentation for any software application in minutes. Employees record workflows, and Guidde’s AI automatically generates step-by-step video guides that can be delivered directly within the apps employees are learning. The approach has made Guidde a go-to solution for enterprises training thousands of employees on new tools like Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow and SAP.

AI adoption has become an urgent priority for every enterprise. By the end of 2026, the majority of companies will have a Chief AI Officer, and LLM budgets now exceed spending on cybersecurity, data warehouses, and cloud infrastructure. But most companies are hitting the same wall: every employee in Ops, IT, Legal, Finance, and beyond must learn how to work side by side with AI agents – and while AI has become conversational, enterprise training has not. Without real prompts and workflows to learn from, employees get generic, one-size-fits-all answers, and AI agents meant to automate work break down, hallucinate, or make costly mistakes at scale.

Guidde helps solve these challenges by observing how employees actually work and using that data to train both humans and AI agents. Enterprises now use Guidde across more than 50,000 applications and millions of workflows, giving the company a unique dataset of how work gets done inside large organizations. The resulting documentation is delivered directly within the apps employees are learning, and simultaneously made available to AI agents through Guidde’s API.

“Think of what navigation apps are doing for the future of driving. They mapped roads by observing how people actually drive, and those maps now guide autonomous vehicles,” said Yoav Einav, CEO and Co-Founder of Guidde. “We’re doing the same for enterprise workflows. Today, we’re observing how employees work to build the maps AI agents will need. It starts with humans in the loop, and over time moves toward full autonomy.”

“I believe Guidde is solving one of the biggest blockers to successful AI adoption: the knowledge infrastructure. This solution, coupled with the team’s execution and product-market fit, made this investment decision straightforward,” said Ronen Nir, Managing Director at PSG. “Organizations need dynamic, multimedia systems that serve both humans and AI agents. Guidde uniquely addresses both, effortlessly helping create rich knowledge while structuring it for AI consumption.”

About Guidde

Guidde is an AI digital adoption platform that serves as the creation and consumption hub for modern organizations. The company’s platform uses generative AI to transform workflows into rich, multi-format documentation in minutes, helping enable companies to scale knowledge across their teams, customers, and AI systems. Founded in 2020, Guidde today serves over 4,500 organizations globally, from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2920204/Guidde_Photo.jpg

Media Contact

Lazer Cohen

[email protected]

SOURCE Guidde

Sequoia leads Seed and Series A funding to help firms operationalize proprietary data for AI

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2026 — Rowspace, the AI platform that accelerates financial services firms’ decision making based on their proprietary data, launched today with $50 million in funding across a Series A co-led by Sequoia and Emergence Capital and a seed round led by Sequoia. Stripe, Conviction, Basis Set, Twine, and angels from across finance participated in both rounds.

The best investors have spent decades building something invaluable: institutional judgment. The partner who’s seen five hundred deals knows which patterns matter. The credit analyst who’s survived three cycles knows what to watch for. But that knowledge is trapped across messy repositories of memos and models, email exchanges, and myriad legacy systems.

Rowspace puts this data to work. It connects structured and unstructured data across a firm’s entire history—document repositories, investment and accounting systems, data infrastructure, and more—then applies a finance-native lens that reflects how that firm reconciles information, interprets discrepancies, and makes decisions. Rowspace scales and accelerates the application of the firm’s judgment to its most data-intensive work—and delivers it wherever teams already operate, whether through Rowspace’s own interface, within tools like Excel and Teams, or directly into a firm’s existing data infrastructure.

“Finance is full of high-stakes decisions. There used to be a tradeoff between moving quickly and making fully informed, nuanced decisions using all the possible data at a firm’s disposal. Our AI platform eliminates that tradeoff,” says Michael Manapat, Co-founder and CEO of Rowspace. “We’re building specialized intelligence that turns a firm’s data into scalable judgment with the rigor finance demands.”

Firms managing hundreds of billions to almost a trillion dollars in assets are already using Rowspace for portfolio monitoring, complex analysis across decades of deal data, and credit portfolio optimization. These institutions chose Rowspace because generic AI tools couldn’t deliver the specificity and uncompromising accuracy their decisions require.

“I’ve lived this problem,” says Yibo Ling, Co-founder and COO of Rowspace. “As a former CFO who’s managed a major investment portfolio, I’ve made decisions by synthesizing data across fragmented systems. Most tech tools aren’t comprehensive or nuanced enough for finance. And most finance tools need to raise their technical ceiling. We intend to do both.”

The company plans to scale quickly this year across its San Francisco and New York offices, with a focus on engineering and research talent drawn to hard problems with major economic implications.

“Michael built the machine learning systems at Stripe that process billions of transactions and helped drive Notion’s expansion into AI. Yibo has been a finance leader and investor who’s wrestled with the exact challenges Rowspace is solving,” says Alfred Lin, who led the investment for Sequoia. “They’ve seen the problem from both sides, pairing technical depth with firsthand understanding of what customers actually need. That combination is rare.”

Many of Rowspace’s backers have been connected to the founders for years before they decided to start the company.

“We back founders who bring lived experience to big, enterprise goals—basically the definition of the Rowspace team,” says Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital. “They’re doing the previously impossible work of connecting proprietary data, and reconciling and reasoning over it with real rigor. Without this foundation, it doesn’t matter what other AI tools you’re using.”

With Rowspace, a PE firm evaluating a new deal can draw on decades of institutional knowledge to inform its assessment of the risks and opportunities for that deal. A growth investor making portfolio allocation decisions can act on what’s true today, not numbers that will take weeks to reconcile. A credit investor can find new opportunities that match its macro view while making sure compliance tests at both the loan and portfolio level are satisfied. Every decision is informed by the full depth of what these firms know.

“Imagine a firm that never forgets,” says Manapat. “Where an experienced investor’s workflows—touching many different tools in specific ways—can be codified and multiplied. When that’s possible, a first-year analyst can tap into decades of institutional knowledge, and judgment scales with a firm instead of being diluted. That’s what we’re building.”

Rowspace deploys directly into customer environments, so data never leaves their control. Stringent security around a firm’s most important asset—its data—has been a design principle from the start. This is the foundation that allows the most exacting firms in the world to fully lean into the AI era and compound their advantage over time.

About Rowspace
Rowspace helps financial firms make faster, sharper decisions by turning their proprietary data into compounding edge. The platform connects structured and unstructured data across a firm’s entire history, models how that firm operates and thinks, and delivers that intelligence wherever teams work. Rowspace deploys directly into customer environments for complete data security. The company is based in San Francisco and led by former Notion CTO Michael Manapat and two-time CFO Yibo Ling. Learn more at rowspace.ai.

SOURCE Rowspace

TORONTO, Feb. 25, 2026 — SeedTwo Capital has led an oversubscribed $2 million seed round in RobosizeME, a startup designing intelligent workflow automation purpose-built to remove the repetitive, manual work from hotel operations.

While the global hotel industry generates over $580 billion annually, much of its back-office operations — reservations, finance, revenue management, and guest services — remain manual and labor-intensive. RobosizeME targets this high-volume, repetitive workflow segment, helping operators reduce errors, cut operational costs, and free staff to focus on revenue-generating and guest-facing activities.

“Hospitality is one of the most operationally complex industries in the world, yet many core processes are still highly manual,” said Roger Sholanki, Founder of SeedTwo Capital. “RobosizeME has built a compelling solution that delivers immediate ROI for hotel operators by embedding automation directly into existing workflows. We’re excited to partner with the team as they scale their impact across the global hospitality ecosystem.”

Founded by hospitality veteran and co-founder of Sciant, Stephen Burke, RobosizeME integrates directly with PMS, CRS, POS, and financial systems, deploying AI as a managed service. Workflow automation runs 24/7, handling tasks like OTA commission reconciliation, payment routing, rate loading, and guest profile management & merging at chain-level scale, helping hotel teams be more effective and efficient across portfolios without adding headcount. One US-based hotel chain saved more than $1M USD in labor costs with less than one year payback period thanks to our automations taking over key tasks in finance, revenue and distribution management and reservations.

“We founded RobosizeME to give hospitality teams their time back,” said Stephen Burke, CEO of RobosizeME. “This investment from SeedTwo Capital is a strong validation of our vision and traction. With their support, we’ll accelerate our mission to transform hotel operations by deploying AI-enabled automation that operates around the clock and seamlessly alongside human teams, driving strong ROI to our customers.”

SeedTwo Capital specializes in backing Vertical SaaS and AI companies that have moved beyond the early grind, partnering with founder–led businesses that have real revenue, loyal customers and clear growth opportunities between seed and Series A. The funding positions RobosizeME to capture a growing opportunity within the global hospitality operations ecosystem, a segment that is increasingly adopting SaaS and AI solutions to relieve teams, boost profitability and standardize operations across multi-property portfolios.

Other investors participating in the round include Sparking Capital and BrightCap Ventures, who led the previous round, and Botanique Hospitality, along with several angel investors. 

About SeedTwo Capital

SeedTwo Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage SaaS and AI companies with strong product-market fit and high growth potential. The firm provides more than capital – offering strategic guidance, operational support, and access to an extensive network of operators, advisors, and investors to help founders accelerate growth. For more information visit www.seedtwo.com

About RobosizeME

RobosizeME is a leading provider of AI-enabled workflow automation solutions tailored to hotel groups. By combining digital workers with deep expertise in hotel APIs and AI development, RobosizeME streamlines reservation, finance, distribution and front office critical workflows for hospitality groups—helping them operate with greater speed, accuracy and efficiency. Backed by advanced security certifications (ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI-DSS), RobosizeME’s industry-specific automation solutions ensure the highest levels of data protection, compliance and data sovereignty.

Trusted by renowned hotel companies such as Design Hotels, The Dorchester Collection, GHA, Kempinski, Loews Hotels, Louvre Hotels Group, Radisson Hotel Group, and more, RobosizeME continues to set the standard for secure, specialized automation at scale in the hospitality sector. For more information visit www.robosize.me

Media Contact:
Roger Sholanki
(877) 733-3896

SOURCE SeedTwo Capital Inc.

Arizona-based VC firm broadens its reach to provide capital to exceptional founders in underserved markets across North America

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Feb. 25, 2026 — AZ-VC, a venture capital firm fueling innovation in underserved markets, has announced its rebrand as Copper Sky Capital, reflecting the firm’s evolution into a broader platform backing early-stage technology companies across North America. The firm is sector agnostic with a focus on AI software products.

Founded in 2021, the firm is led by Managing Partners Jason Pressman, a long-time partner at Shasta Ventures, and Jack Selby, a former PayPal executive.

The firm maintains its core conviction that great companies are being founded and scaled across North America. Despite representing the majority of the U.S. population and economic activity, regions outside traditional tech hubs receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital investment. Copper Sky views this imbalance as a structural opportunity to support innovation and invest in regional technology ecosystems where it is growing organically.

The rebrand signals Copper Sky’s expanded mission to lead Seed and Series A rounds in companies primarily outside the traditional technology hubs of Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston.

“Venture capital has spent the last decade confusing proximity to Silicon Valley with quality and value,” said Selby. “Extraordinary founders are building companies with tremendous potential all across the country, supported by world-class AI and software engineering university programs across the U.S. Copper Sky exists to deploy capital directly into these markets—without forcing companies into inflated hubs and valuation frameworks that often distort long-term outcomes.”

In addition to providing capital, Copper Sky has built a platform of operating partners with deep domain expertise to support founders as they scale.

“Our mission is to help founders build durable companies, not flashes in the pan,” said Pressman. “We’ve assembled a network of experienced operating partners who work alongside teams to develop the capabilities and playbooks needed to scale with confidence and independence.”

Copper Sky builds on the foundation established by AZ-VC, including its inaugural Fund I (which raised over $115 million in committed capital) and a growing portfolio of high-growth software companies. The firm remains focused on Seed and Series A rounds, is sector agnostic and primarily backs companies with early product-market fit and revenue. Its approach emphasizes long-term partnership, operational rigor, and thoughtful capital structures designed to preserve founder flexibility.

Rather than pursuing inflated early valuations, Copper Sky focuses on disciplined entry points that help founders avoid the “valuation trap” that can narrow future options over time. The firm believes this approach supports a wider range of successful outcomes for founders, employees, and investors alike.

“We believe that being thoughtful about how a company is capitalized early on creates room to grow sustainably, maintain optionality over time, and maximize enterprise value,” Selby said. “That discipline helps founders focus on building lasting value rather than chasing short-term signals from the market.”

About Copper Sky Capital

Copper Sky Capital is a U.S.-based venture capital firm that leads Seed and Series A investments across North America, primarily outside Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. The firm partners with founders building durable, high-growth companies. Copper Sky is led by Managing Partners Jason Pressman, a long-time partner at Shasta Ventures, and Jack Selby, a former PayPal executive. For more information, visit www.copperskycapital.com.

SOURCE AZ-VC

• Sovereign by Design: User data lives on device; users control where every AI call runs. Integrate with enterprise AIs or local LLMs.
• Chief of AI Staff: As professionals manage growing fleets of AI tools, Quill keeps context local and coordination seamless
• Context from Conversations: Starts as a meeting notetaker, becomes users’ personal AI layer — learning from the 75% of their day spent talking with others
• Lead investor is Basis Set Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Naval Ravikant, Morado Ventures, and AME Cloud Ventures.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2026 — Quill Meetings today announced $6.5 million in seed funding and the launch of Quilliam, a sovereign Chief of AI Staff agent for modern professionals.

As professionals increasingly rely on multiple AI tools — for writing, coding, research, and communication — they need a layer that holds context and coordinates across all of them. But where does that context come from? Conversations. Professionals spend 75% of their day talking with others — in meetings, calls, and collaboration. Quill starts there, capturing context from every conversation, and evolves into a Chief of AI Staff that coordinates your growing fleet of AI tools with full knowledge of how you work.

Unlike AI tools that lock users into rigid workflows and opaque cloud infrastructure, Quill gives users complete control over where their data lives, how AI inference runs, and how their workflows evolve over time.

The round was led by Basis Set Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Naval Ravikant, Morado Ventures, and AME Cloud Ventures. The funding will accelerate product development and team expansion, including the recent additions of Founding COO/Growth Yacob Berhane and head of enterprise, Clayton Bryan.

“Work is becoming AI management,” said Michael Daugherty, co-founder and CEO of Quill. “But AI tools don’t talk to each other and don’t really remember how users work. Our goal is to eliminate the coordination tax. Quill starts where the context is — conversations with other humans — learns how users operate and coordinates their AI staff on user’s behalf. So users can focus on the conversation, not the follow-through.”

Sovereign by Design

Quill’s architecture reflects its philosophy of user sovereignty. All user data lives on the user’s device, and Quill can operate fully without ever touching Quill’s cloud:

• Audio never leaves the user’s device — transcription happens entirely locally
• Cloud sync is optional; when enabled, all data is end-to-end encrypted and Quill’s servers never see plaintext content
• Users choose where AI inference runs, whether in enterprise cloud providers (Google Vertex, AWS Bedrock) with zero content logging, or even fully local models for air-gapped or completely offline operation
• Workflows, integrations, and templates are fully customizable
• No user data is ever used for model training

This configurable approach allows enterprises to meet their specific compliance requirements — from GDPR and the EU AI Act to industry-specific regulations — without sacrificing functionality. For organizations requiring complete data sovereignty, Quill can operate entirely on-device with no external network calls.

“We believe Quill’s approach to data sovereignty is genuinely differentiated,” said Christine Tsai, founding partner and CEO of 500 Global. “They’ve built an architecture that lets security-conscious enterprises get the benefits of AI while mitigating compliance risks. This will be significant for regulated industries and companies that require on-prem AI solutions.”

Proactive, Not Reactive

Quilliam can connect to other tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP), including Notion, Linear, Affinity, Obsidian, Airtable, Manus, and Gamma. But unlike simple integrations, Quilliam uses context from meetings and user history to proactively suggest and execute workflows:

• After a product meeting, Quilliam can create or modify tickets in Linear, update documentation in Notion, and draft stakeholder updates
• Before a client call, Quilliam surfaces relevant history and prepares briefing materials
• Over time, Quilliam will help to customize Quill with automations, templates, and other improvements specifically for you.

Availability

Quill is available now for individuals and enterprise teams. To see Quilliam in action, visit www.quillmeetings.com or contact [email protected].

About Quill

Quill is the creator of Quilliam, a sovereign Chief of AI Staff that coordinates your AI tools with context from your conversations. With a local-first architecture that keeps all data on-device by default and offers optional end-to-end encrypted sync, Quill enables teams in highly regulated industries to transform conversations into action without compromising security or compliance. Learn more at www.quillmeetings.com.

Media Contact:
Nicole Conley
nicole.conley@taniscomm 

SOURCE Quill Meetings

Elly Adapts to Your Recruiting Workflow, Bringing Clarity and Focus in High-Volume Hiring

NEW YORK, Feb. 25, 2026 — Elly today announced the launch of its AI-native hiring platform along with $8 million in funding led by Sorenson Capital, with participation from Atomic and Next Wave Capital. Rob Rueckert, partner at Sorenson Capital’s venture and growth funds, will join Elly’s board of directors.

Today, recruiting teams are caught between legacy applicant tracking software that demands constant manual updates and a growing stack of AI tools that don’t share information or work together. Teams often juggle five or more disconnected platforms, forcing candidates to repeat themselves, interviewers to work without complete information, and recruiters to spend critical time coordinating logistics instead of evaluating talent.

At the same time, hiring choices don’t happen all at once. They develop gradually across sourcing conversations, interviews, and internal discussions. Most platforms track static states or force recruiters to reconstruct judgment calls after the fact, often from scattered notes and incomplete information.

A Platform That Works the Way You Actually Hire
Elly takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than stitching together standalone tools or asking recruiters to maintain rigid workflows, Elly is built with AI at its core, spanning sourcing, interviewing, and applicant tracking as one unified platform. It captures what’s happening as hiring unfolds and surfaces what teams need to know next, without manual data entry or constant upkeep.

Historically, interviews and screenings have been some of the most time-intensive and information-rich parts of hiring—yet the insight from those conversations is rarely captured or reused. Because Elly is AI-native, it can interpret unstructured conversations and evolving feedback as they happen, rather than relying on fields, forms, or manual input. Elly treats interviews as an asset rather than a sunk cost. Each screening, interview, and discussion becomes structured, searchable signal that compounds over time, giving teams a clearer picture of candidates and improving hiring quality as volume grows.

Instead of requiring recruiters to push updates into the software, Elly understands what’s happening automatically:

• Interviewers see what candidates have already shared—no starting from scratch
• Feedback carries forward as the hiring process evolves
• Next steps stay clear as opinions evolve across the team

The result: recruiters spend less time maintaining tools and more time applying judgment where it matters most.

“Recruiting teams are overwhelmed by software that was never designed to reflect how hiring actually works,” said Kristen Habacht, CEO of Elly. “Elly flips that model by understanding the reasoning behind choices as they form. When the platform knows what’s happening, recruiters can focus on evaluating candidates instead of administering technology.”

Momentum Across Industries
Early customers are already using Elly to manage active pipelines across technology, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and hospitality, with teams reporting measurable time savings, including:

• Up to 1 hour and 45 minutes saved per candidate on interview write-ups and documentation
• 3 to 5 hours saved per week by reducing manual note-taking and follow-ups
• 5 to 10 hours saved per week by replacing live screening calls with short, targeted interview reviews

The $8 million round reflects growing demand for technology that reduces complexity rather than adding to it.

“We’ve backed Kristen before and seen firsthand how she builds products that actually fit how people work,” said Rob Rueckert, Partner at Sorenson Capital. “Elly understands hiring judgment as it forms, not after the fact. That fundamentally changes how recruiting teams operate—they stop managing software and start making better hires.”

Created as part of Atomic, a venture studio with a track record of launching successful companies, Elly was purpose-built for today’s recruiting landscape. The new capital will support continued product development, customer growth, and advancement of Elly’s AI capabilities and sales and marketing efforts.

For more information, visit Elly.ai.

About Elly
Elly is the AI-powered hiring platform built around how talent teams actually work, helping them understand who to focus on and what to do next. Designed to reduce administrative burden and improve the candidate experience, Elly helps organizations hire faster and make better choices without unnecessary complexity. For more information, visit Elly.ai.

Media Contact
ROAM Communications for Elly
[email protected] 

SOURCE Recruit Tech Labs dba Elly

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2026 — Chariot Defense, a defense technology company pioneering next-generation battlefield power systems, today announced it has raised $34 million in Series A funding, bringing total funding to $41 million. The round was led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz, and with new participation from DCVC, LMNT, Marlinspike, Overmatch, Shield Capital, Ensemble, and Trenches Capital. Existing investors General Catalyst and XYZ also participated.

Power is becoming the critical constraint across military operations. To solve this pressing challenge, Chariot Defense has built a deployable, software-defined power layer that senses, prioritizes, and routes power across mission-critical systems in real time, enabling warfighters to operate without interruption, detectable signature, or wasted capacity.

“We’re on a mission to ensure power is never the limiting factor in modern warfare,” said Adam Warmoth, Chariot Defense Founder and CEO. “Power on the battlefield is less about how much energy you carry; it is more about how intelligently you control and distribute it. Chariot’s Amphora systems act as a combat multiplier in the field, enabling soldiers to operate with greater freedom. We enhance their ability to see, sense, strike, and survive in contested environments. The speed with which warfighters have adopted our systems is a testament to our technology and our incredible team. We’re already turning this capital into capabilities as we scale to meet the growing demand.”

The funding comes on the heels of new sales and contracts with the U.S. Army, DIU Project GI, and commercial customers.

“Incredible breakthroughs in power are happening in the commercial world, from advanced batteries, to next-generation microcontrollers and power electronics, while much of defense still relies on legacy systems,” said Erin Price-Wright, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Chariot is bringing that innovation directly into national security and building the software-defined power backbone our modern military systems demand. The future of defense will be shaped by energy, speed, and adaptability, and Chariot is leading that shift.”

Investing to Meet Urgent Demand
The raise will accelerate production of Chariot’s agile power system products and support the development of an operating system for the command, control, and distribution of electric power on the battlefield. The funding will also enable Chariot to significantly expand its engineering team to meet surging demand. This news comes just six months after the company launched out of stealth in July 2025.

“We are excited to back Chariot again, as they have operationalized the Anduril-style playbook of defense problem solving and productization by driving systems to the field early and iterating essential features quickly to get them deployed.” says Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital. “Demand for rapid fielding has never been stronger, and Chariot is a prime example of transformation in contact.”

Leading with the Amphora Product
Modern operations are failing from lack of power. Chariot’s universal and agile Amphora hybrid power systems enhance warfighter lethality and survivability by tightly integrating energy storage, conversion, and distribution capabilities to deliver power when, where, and how it is needed. These systems are already being adopted by units to extend operational independence and better adapt during distributed, expeditionary missions via ubiquitous, dependable power. Chariot has directly sold Amphora systems to customers following recent exercises, including to commercial customers who recognize the importance of power to accelerate their own innovation and to create resilience in their existing deployments.

Building for Scale
Warmoth concluded: “Chariot went from seed round to air-assaulting equipment into force-on-force exercises within six months and we generated revenue within twelve months. That kind of traction is exactly why we’re rapidly expanding.”

The company is actively recruiting mechanical, electrical, and software engineers with expertise in high-voltage energy storage, power electronics, and distributed systems to build the power infrastructure that will define modern military operations.

About Chariot Defense:
Chariot Defense is a defense technology company pioneering next-generation power distribution systems built for the demands of modern warfare. Its Amphora platform provides modular voltage and low-signature power at the tactical edge—powering everything from radios and drones to sensors and directed energy systems. Founded in 2024, Chariot is backed by leading national security investors and led by a team with deep experience across defense, technology, and government.

Learn more at https://www.chariotdefense.com/.

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SOURCE Chariot Defense