Led by Lotus Lake Capital, the financing will accelerate the development of TPM004, a differentiated ultra-long-acting amylin/calcitonin receptor dual agonist, and advance the company’s proprietary PepTetris™ peptide discovery platform for obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases

• Developing a differentiated portfolio of ultra-long-acting peptide therapeutics targeting metabolic diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and related disorders, with the potential to achieve best-in-class efficacy and dosing convenience
• Advancing TPM004, a next-generation ultra-long-acting amylin/calcitonin receptor dual agonist, toward IND submission and first-in-human clinical development
• Expanding the proprietary PepTetris™ peptide discovery platform, leveraging advanced peptide engineering and artificial intelligence approaches to enable the discovery of once-monthly and potentially longer-duration peptide therapeutics
• The angel financing was led by Lotus Lake Capital, with participation from Stars Capital, Tainuo Capital, Blue Ocean Capital, and renowned entrepreneur Mr. Yousheng Shen, providing strategic support to advance clinical development and platform innovation

SHENZHEN, China, July 28, 2026 — Torrey Pines Medicine (Shenzhen) Ltd., a biotechnology company dedicated to developing next-generation ultra-long-acting peptide therapeutics for metabolic diseases, today announced the successful completion of an angel financing round raising tens of millions of RMB.

The round was led by Lotus Lake Ventures, with participation from Stars Capital, Tainuo Capital, Blue Ocean Capital, and renowned entrepreneur Mr. Yousheng Shen. The proceeds will primarily support corporate development, focus on accelerating IND filing and Phase I clinical trials for core pipeline asset TPM004, and further refine the proprietary PepTetris™ ultra-long-acting peptide technology platform to continuously empower early-stage R&D pipelines.

“We are deeply grateful for the trust and support from our investors. R&D in metabolic diseases is entering a new era. Significant unmet clinical needs remain regarding patient compliance, enhanced efficacy, and better overall therapeutic experience. At Torrey Pines Medicine, we will continue leveraging our proprietary platform to engineer globally competitive, ultra-long-acting peptide therapeutics that provide convenient and highly effective long-term management solutions for patients.” said Dr. Qingsong Zhu, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Torrey Pines Medicine.

Representing the lead investor in this financing, Kai Guo, partner at Lotus Lake Ventures, said, “We have long tracked global trends in metabolic innovation and firmly believe that ultra-long-acting technology represents a critical frontier for next-generation metabolic therapies. Torrey Pines Medicine combines a highly experienced international leadership team with proprietary platform technologies and a differentiated pipeline addressing significant unmet medical needs. We look forward to supporting the company as it advances its lead programs into the clinic and establishes itself as a globally recognized biotechnology company.”

According to Dr. Weijun Shen, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Torrey Pines Medicine, the development of truly next-generation peptide therapeutics requires more than simply extending drug half-life. “Developing ultra-long-acting peptide medicines requires a holistic optimization of molecular design, receptor pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, manufacturability, and clinical translatability. Our objective is not simply to prolong circulation time, but to engineer molecules that deliver the optimal balance of efficacy, safety, dosing convenience, and developability.”

Dr. Nieng Yan, President of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation (SMART) and Director of Shenzhen Bay Laboratory (SZBL), congratulated the company on completing its angel financing. “We extend our warmest congratulations to Torrey Pines Medicine on the successful completion of its angel financing. As a flagship venture incubated by Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Torrey Pines Medicine encapsulates the deep integration of foundational research, technological innovation, and industrial translation. We look forward to seeing them leverage their international team and platform advantages to accelerate the translation of original scientific breakthroughs into clinical applications.”

About Torrey Pines Medicine

Torrey Pines Medicine is a pre-clinical-stage biotechnology company incubated by Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, dedicated to developing next-generation ultra-long-acting peptide therapeutics for obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), and other chronic metabolic diseases. To address key clinical unmet needs associated with current mainstream weight-loss treatments—including gastrointestinal adverse events, muscle mass loss, poor long-term adherence, and weight regain post-discontinuation—Torrey Pines Medicine is building an end-to-end R&D engine focused on ultra-long-acting peptide novel drugs.

The company’s proprietary PepTetris™ platform integrates AI-guided design, innovative molecular engineering, half-life extension, and multi-target synergy. By significantly extending in vivo exposure while maintaining pharmacological potency and minimizing adverse reactions, PepTetris™ enables the efficient development of monthly or longer dosing regimen peptides. Lead asset TPM004 is a next-generation ultra-long-acting amylin/calcitonin dual receptor agonist (DACRA) targeted for key clinical readout data in 2027. Preclinical studies demonstrate TPM004 supports potential monthly subcutaneous administration, exhibits superior weight-loss efficacy, delays weight rebound post-treatment, and possesses high solubility and stability at physiological pH, enabling co-formulation development with various GLP-1 therapeutics.

Torrey Pines Medicine boasts a core leadership team with over 20 years of experience in innovative peptide drug development and commercialization. Team members bring extensive domain expertise from leading global and domestic research institutions and pharmaceutical enterprises, including Insilico Medicine, Novartis GNF, Scripps Research – Calibr, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Peking University, and HEC Pharma. The team’s comprehensive capabilities span the entire drug discovery and development lifecycle, including target discovery, AI-assisted drug design, drug screening (pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, CMC development), preclinical evaluation, IND regulatory filings, and clinical trial execution, enabling seamless execution from bench to bedside.

About Lotus Lake Ventures

Lotus Lake Ventures is a venture capital fund management institution equity-held by Beijing Tsinghua Industrial R&D Institute. Reorganized in 2013 during the construction of Tsinghua University’s tech transfer framework, Lotus Lake Ventures is one of China’s pioneer institutional investors systematically backing university tech transfer and hard-tech innovation. Focusing on hard technology, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing, Lotus Lake Ventures targets early and growth-stage enterprises featuring high barriers to entry and original innovation capabilities, having backed over 100 portfolio companies.

Contact us:

Torrey Pines Medicine
Rm 813A, Building 1B,
669 Beizhen Rd,
Shenzhen, China
Email: IR (at) tpmeds.com; BD (at) tpmeds.com

SOURCE Torrey Pines Medicine

Backed by Fifth Wall, the company raised a $7.25M seed round for AI that’s custom-built inside the business, not bolted on top of it

CHICAGO, July 28, 2026 — Antares Labs today announced its public launch and $7.25M seed round with participation from Fifth Wall, Base10 Partners, Bloomberg Beta, and Sandwith Ventures.

“Every real estate owner-operator is asking the same question right now: how do we actually put AI to work inside our business? Not a pilot, not a dashboard—something that runs on our data, solves our problems, and compounds over time. Antares Labs exists to answer that. We embed directly with our clients to build AI around strategic capabilities that move the needle—accelerating investments, improving lease-up. The output isn’t a report or vendor to manage. It’s intelligence that lives inside their business, owned by them, and gets smarter daily,” shared Noaman Ahmad, Chief Executive Officer.

Antares Labs starts with the business problem, not the platform. Its forward-deployed teams embed directly with customers to learn how the business actually works, then build company-specific AI solutions around the core problems—without requiring a data lake, system overhaul, or years-long implementation. The platform integrates with every major foundation model (AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic), routing requests dynamically to balance cost, performance, and quality—so customers are never locked into a single AI provider. Because the platform lives inside the customer’s environment, proprietary data, workflows, relationships, and logic stay with the customer. ROI shows up in 30 days, not 30 months.

The problems Antares Labs solves span the full spectrum of real estate operations. For a multifamily developer, that means finding deals in the next high-return submarket before anyone else does. For hospitality REITs, it means giving owners real-time visibility into market dynamics and connecting it to the staffing, service, and spending decisions their operators make every day, instead of learning about them a quarter later in a report. And across every asset type, it means predicting which tenants are likely to churn—before it ever becomes a vacancy or a lost lease. Unlike black-box AI, every Antares Labs recommendation is fully traceable—from data to signal to business strategy—and audit-ready for finance, compliance, and the Board.

Antares Labs is already working with some of the largest owner-operators, including Quarterra. “For over a decade, we’ve heard the same frustration from the largest owner-operators in the world—decades of institutional knowledge, proprietary data, and hard-won relationships that have never been fully activated,” shared Brendan Wallace, Founder, CEO, and CIO, Fifth Wall. “Nobody transforms alone—not on willpower, not on data sitting in a system no one uses. You need something actively working the plan with you, every day. Antares Labs was built to be that for real estate operators. The window to move is now, and the cost of waiting is real. I’m thrilled to bring this vision to life with Noaman and his team, whose deep industry knowledge positions them better than anyone to move fast and activate it.”

About Antares Labs

Antares Labs is building the AI brain for real estate—one that turns institutional knowledge into action. Built with operators, for operators, the company helps owners, developers, investors, and asset managers turn proprietary data, workflows, and institutional knowledge into custom AI systems built inside their own environments. Antares Labs is backed by Fifth Wall, Base10 Partners, Bloomberg Beta, and Sandwith Ventures. For more information, please visit antareslabs.ai.

About Fifth Wall

Founded by Brendan Wallace, Fifth Wall is the largest investment firm focused on technology for the built environment. The Firm is driving the growth of nearly 170 companies, backing category-defining PropTech leaders such as Opendoor, Procore, Blend, Hippo, and Bilt Rewards. It’s supported by nearly 115 of the world’s largest real estate owner-operators including CBRE, Hilton, Hines, Marriott, Public Storage, Related, and Starwood. Founded and headquartered in Los Angeles, Fifth Wall’s other offices include San Francisco and London. For more information, visit fifthwall.com.

SOURCE Antares Labs

Founded by the team behind Medigate, Act targets risk at the infrastructure layer by eliminating the access paths behind every breach.

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 28, 2026 — Act Security, an action-centric cloud security company, today emerged from stealth with $60 million in total funding and the launch of its cloud security platform. AI has turned point fixes like patching into a losing strategy, flooding security teams with endless tables of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Act eliminates the conditions that make them exploitable, systematically reducing the access surface across cloud infrastructure by enforcing boundaries for humans, workloads, and AI agents. Since its founding in 2025, Act has raised a $20 million seed round led by Team8 and Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Hetz Ventures and Claltech, and a $40 million Series A led by Notable Capital with participation from Startpoint Capital and SVCI.

Organizations have accumulated massive access sprawl across their cloud environments, with the vast majority of granted cloud permissions unneeded and unused, creating additional, and compounding, risk. For years, the risk was manageable, as exploitation of vulnerabilities moved at human speed. With AI now operating on every access path and exploiting it at machine speed, this problem has become urgent. When Frontier AI models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos find and exploit access paths faster than any team can respond, and AI agents now run inside production systems with real autonomy, access becomes the primary attack surface of the AI era.

Traditional cloud security traps teams in reactive remediation, a model that breaks under the stress of AI’s speed. Act eliminates the conditions that make risk exploitable, systematically reducing the access surface across cloud infrastructure by enforcing deterministic boundaries that limit what humans, workloads, and AI agents can reach. These controls are grounded in how the business actually operates and continuously enforced through cloud-native and traditional controls customers already own.By reasoning across identity, network, and AI access together, Act helps organizations regain control, enforce the principle of least privilege, and safely scale AI adoption.

“Based on what we are seeing from our customers, close to 97% of cloud access sits dormant and unused, and now AI agents are inheriting those same old human permissions, running around the clock, at machine speed, with none of the judgment a person would apply,” said Jonathan Langer, co-founder and CEO of Act Security. “In parallel, Mythos confirmed what much of the cyber world had started to realize, that we can’t patch our way out of everything, no matter how hard we try. Visibility tools surface thousands of findings and leave teams triaging symptoms one by one, while the root cause, the access architecture, goes unaddressed. Instead of chasing findings, we remove the conditions that turn risk into a breach, making the cloud structurally secure before attacks unfold.”

The platform enables organizations to:

• Eliminate access paths that attackers, AI-driven and otherwise, exploit. By removing the exposed pathways attackers move through, the attacker has nowhere to go.
• Deploy AI agents safely by enforcing tightly defined access boundaries around every AI workload, so agents reach exactly what they need and nothing more.
• Clean existing access sprawl and prevent access erosion over time, ensuring new sprawl is not created. The platform continuously validates and tightens boundaries and extends into the CI/CD pipeline so new access violations never reach production.
• Achieve provable, continuous compliance with perimeter and data-boundary enforcement mapping directly to controls required by NIST 800-53, PCI DSS, HIPAA and more.

“We backed Act because of the caliber of the founding team who saw the access problem before the rest of the market did,” said Liran Grinberg, co-founder and Managing Partner at Team8. “Cloud security has spent a decade telling organizations where their risk is. Act is the first platform that actually removes it, and in an era where AI exploits exposure in minutes rather than months, that’s the new baseline. We believe this is one of the largest opportunities in cybersecurity today.”

About Act Security

Act Security is an action-centric cloud security company. Rather than surfacing findings, Act eliminates the conditions that make them exploitable, systematically reducing the access surface across cloud infrastructure by enforcing boundaries for humans, workloads, and AI agents. Grounded in how the business actually operates and enforced through the cloud-native controls customers already own, Act helps organizations eliminate attack paths, safely scale AI adoption, and maintain continuous, audit-ready compliance. Act has raised $60 million from investors, including Team8, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Notable Capital, and was founded by the team behind Medigate, the medical-device security company acquired by Claroty for $400 million. For more information, visit: https://act.security/ 

Act Security Media Contact 
Raanan Loew
Headline Media
[email protected]
US: +1 347 897 9276

SOURCE Act Security

According to Gartner, by 2028, the average Fortune 500 company will run more than 150,000 AI agents, up from fewer than 15 just last year. Nonetheless, recent Omdia research indicates that 96% of organizations are running AI agents on governance models that weren’t built for them. Agents operate autonomously inside the most sensitive systems an enterprise runs. They need strong identity and attribution, deep observability and strict control. Yet while identity has become the control point for the agentic era, it remains one critical challenge most companies have not yet solved.

Hush gives companies a sanctioned path for AI agents to act across every system. Every agent is enrolled in a central registry, stripped of standing credentials and granted scoped just-in-time (JIT) permissions at runtime – every action logged, with a centralized kill switch when needed.

“We’ve spent decades protecting enterprises from rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats,” said Ramanath Iyer, Chief Strategist at Akamai. “Every major shift in internet usage and traffic has forced a rethink of how enterprises are secured. AI agents are driving the next transformation, and identity is the piece most companies haven’t solved yet. That’s the layer Hush is building.”

That shift is already playing out on the ground for companies across the globe, including Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, which has deployed Hush internally and has begun reselling it to its own enterprise clients.

“Our collaboration with Hush is rooted in a shared security philosophy: identity is the ultimate control point for the modern agentic workforce. Hush protects both the autonomous agents and the infrastructure they inhabit, allowing enterprises to deploy AI without sacrificing speed. Believing deeply in this unified approach to identity security, our own organization is working with Hush at scale globally,” said Adeel Saeed, SVP, CTO Global Cyber Resiliency at Kyndryl.

Hush’s new expansion to the agentic workforce allows companies to:

• Discover – Identify every desktop assistant, enterprise AI agent, and custom-built agent, whether managed or shadow. Map the MCPs, tools, and resources each one can reach and actually uses.
• Control – Govern and secure from one place. Register every agent, map it to your existing permissions and enforce least agency by default, with JIT access and kill-switch for every action.
• Audit – Understand every action, prove every decision and maintain a complete audit trail across every AI agent interaction, providing the evidence required for security investigations, governance and compliance.

“Every company already knows how to manage identity for its people and its applications,” said Micha Rave, CEO and co-founder of Hush Security. “But now software acts autonomously, on its own initiative, inside your most sensitive systems. AI agents need strict identity, not just API keys. We solved that for non-human identities, and now we’re extending governance to AI agents.”

“A year ago, we said Hush had the right technology at the right time for machine identity,” added Yoav Leitersdorf, Managing Partner at YL Ventures. “That thesis has only sharpened, with AI agents already a core element in the enterprise workforce, and multiple Fortune 500 companies trusting Hush as they prioritize governance of the AI workforce. Akamai joining this round is a strong signal that the identity gateway for AI agents is quickly becoming core infrastructure, as well.”

“When we backed Hush at seed, static secrets were already a liability and agentic AI has turned that liability into something enterprises can’t ignore,” said Barak Schoster, Partner at Battery Ventures. “Companies are handing autonomous software real authority over real systems, often through the same standing credentials Hush was built to eliminate. Our expanded support of Hush is a bet that proactively securing identities is what will make that authority safe to grant as we head deeper into the agentic age.”

Hush will use the funding to expand its engineering and sales teams, particularly in the United States; accelerate support for enterprise IAM and agentic ecosystems, including deeper integrations with Enterprise AI platforms; and strengthen and expand corporate partnerships.

About Hush Security

Hush Security secures the entire non-human workforce – from secrets, service accounts, and other non-human identities (NHIs) to the fast-growing workforce of AI agents. The platform eliminates standing access and gives AI agents and non-human identities scoped, just in time access, every action governed, logged and revocable from one place. Founded by the team behind Meta Networks (acquired by Proofpoint in 2019) and backed by YL Ventures, Battery Ventures, and Akamai Technologies, Hush is trusted by leading enterprises worldwide. Learn more at www.hush.security.

Media Contact
[email protected]

SOURCE Hush Security

New platform signals the firm’s broader commitment to AI-driven legal practice — automating document-intensive case qualification while keeping attorneys in command of every legal decision.

LOS ANGELES, July 27, 2026 — S4 Capital’s Monks Technology Services, in partnership with Watts Law Firm LLP, today announced the launch of an AI-powered case qualification platform — the latest and most visible step in the firm’s deliberate, firm-wide move toward AI-enabled legal practice.

Purpose-built for AI-enabled intake and workflow management, the platform transforms one of the most complex, document-heavy processes in modern legal practice. It securely ingests claim documentation, extracts and validates critical data, evaluates eligibility against defined legal criteria, estimates recoverable damages, and assembles qualified, attorney-ready case files — in minutes rather than hours. Every case remains subject to attorney review before any legal action is taken.

For Watts Law, the platform is not a one-off experiment. It reflects a conviction, shared across the firm’s leadership, that the next generation of legal advocacy will be defined by firms that pair elite legal judgment with intelligent operations. By removing repetitive administrative work from the intake process, the firm’s attorneys and paralegals are freed to focus where they create the most value: legal strategy, client advocacy, and complex decision-making at scale.

“Our clients expect both precision and speed,” said Mikal Watts, Founder of Watts Law Firm LLP. “AI allows us to remove the operational bottlenecks surrounding case qualification while preserving the legal judgment that only experienced professionals can provide. This platform is the beginning of a much larger ambition for how this firm practices law.”

Developed by Monks Technology Services, the system unites AI-powered document processing, configurable rules engines, workflow automation, and structured human review in a single operational platform — with complete auditability at every step.

“What Watts Law is doing puts them at the front of a shift the entire legal industry is about to go through,” said Karan Chetal, Chief Growth Officer of Monks Technology Services. “This isn’t a firm bolting AI onto an old process — it’s a firm re-architecting how legal work gets done, with technology doing the heavy lifting and lawyers doing what only lawyers can. That’s the model we believe wins, and Watts Law is proving it in production.”

Designed with scalability in mind, the platform’s core architecture readily extends to a wide range of high-volume practice areas, including mass torts, class actions, and personal injury. Watts Law plans to leverage this AI-enabled foundation across additional practice areas as part of its ongoing operational evolution.

About Watts Law

Watts Law is an innovative legal organization dedicated to delivering top-tier legal advocacy and services. Known for its forward-thinking approach to practice management, Watts Law is investing decisively in artificial intelligence and modern legal operations to better serve its clients and lead in complex, high-volume legal landscapes.

About Monks Technology Services

Monks Technology Services helps enterprises and professional organizations apply artificial intelligence, custom software development, and modern technology practices to complex business workflows. As a strategic modernization partner, Monks designs and implements tailored technology solutions that drive efficiency, scalability, and long-term business growth.

About Monks S4 Capital

S4 Capital is a purely digital advertising and marketing services business built for global, multinational, regional, and local clients and millennial-driven influencer brands. The business operates through two data and digital media driven Practices: Marketing Services and Technology Services, emphasising ‘faster, better and more efficient’ execution in an always-on consumer-led environment. Its unitary structure positions the Company as a systems integration partner delivering real-time relevance in the post-agency era.

The Company now has approximately 6,200 people in 34 countries with approximately 82% of net revenue across the Americas, 12% across Europe, the Middle East and Africa and 6% across Asia-Pacific. The longer-term objective is a geographic split of 60%:20%:20%. Marketing Services accounted for approximately 91% of net revenue and Technology Services 9%. The target allocation is a practice split of 75%:25%.

Sir Martin Sorrell was CEO of WPP for 33 years, building it from a £1 million ‘shell’ company in 1985 into the world’s largest advertising and marketing services company, with a market capitalisation of over £16 billion on the day he left. Prior to that, Sir Martin was Group Financial Director of Saatchi & Saatchi Company Plc for nine years.

Media Contacts

Monks Technology Services Media Relations Contact: Sarah Murray Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Monks

• The TactaBot™ combines the company’s Tacta Hand, Skill Capture, and “Dexterous Intelligence” AI engine to bring human-level dexterity and touch to robotics for the first time.
• The Tacta Hand delivers unprecedented dexterity, precision, strength, and industrial-grade reliability over millions of cycles, finally unlocking high-value tasks for robotics.
• The company will deploy the technology with best-in-class manufacturers across the electronics, AI infrastructure, and automotive industries in early 2027.

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 27, 2026 — Tacta Systems, a company that is pioneering Dexterous Intelligence for robotics, today unveiled its technology for the first time. The company’s first product, the TactaBot™, is made up of three groundbreaking components—the Tacta Hand, Skill Capture, and a Dexterous Intelligence AI model—that work together seamlessly to create the world’s most capable, scalable, and adaptable robotic hands for high-value work. The TactaBot is already in high demand among the world’s largest electronics, AI Infrastructure, and automotive manufacturers.

With these advances, Tacta is solving three of the hardest problems in robotics. First, the Tacta Hand finally achieves the dexterity, precision, and strength needed to perform high-value manufacturing tasks, with a design that sustains that level of performance for millions of factory cycles. Second, with its Dexterous Intelligence AI engine and sensory system, Tacta is imbuing robots with a human-level sense of touch, without which it is impossible to automate high-value tasks in manufacturing. The company’s Skill Capture system, powered by the Tacta Glove™, is the third breakthrough, enabling it to build the world’s most complete dataset for dexterous tasks and rapidly teach robots new skills.

The Tacta Hand With Fluidic Tendon™ Actuation

Tacta Hands are based on the company’s proprietary Fluidic Tendon actuation technology, a design that far surpasses traditional motor- and cable-driven alternatives. The human-scale hands include 15 independently actuated joints, each capable of human-like precision along with the strength and speed required for industrial tasks. This novel actuation technology is serviceable in minutes and reliable for millions of cycles in factory-level conditions.

The World’s Most Advanced Tactile Sensor

To provide Tacta Hands with the ability to touch and feel the world as well as humans, Tacta developed the world’s most advanced tactile sensor. Smaller than a grain of sand, each sensor recognizes the full dynamic range of human touch from 250 pascals to 700,000 pascals. Each sensor is sensitive to both the barely-there weight of a settling feather and the driving force of an industrial clamp. The sensor samples 400 times a second, fine enough to read the texture of human skin, and resolves temperature within a tenth of a degree.

The Tacta Glove & Skill Capture System

That same sensor lives in the Tacta Glove, the key to the company’s groundbreaking Skill Capture system. In contrast to language-based AI models, today’s AI models for robotics are severely limited by a lack of relevant real-world data. Traditional approaches to data collection, such as teleoperation and human-operated grippers, are unscalable, impractical, expensive, and collect incomplete datasets.

Tacta’s Skill Capture system instead relies on the Tacta Glove, which can be deployed immediately, without training, and worn naturally by workers as they complete complex tasks. The Tacta Glove and Skill Capture system record force, motion, video, and temperature data directly from workers on the factory floor, producing the most complete record of human skill. Every hour of work performed with the Tacta Glove further compounds Tacta’s Skill Capture dataset.

Building Dexterous Intelligence

The Tacta Glove and Skill Capture system work together to train the company’s Dexterous Intelligence AI model, which enables the Tacta Hand to perform tasks with an unprecedented level of precision and adaptability.

Tacta’s Dexterous Intelligence system is first pretrained with a diverse set of tactile skills collected by the company’s Skill Capture system. Utilizing that same Skill Capture system to gather task-specific data at customer factories, Tacta then fine-tunes its AI models to perform more complex operations and adapt to new, long-tail situations. This approach significantly reduces the training time required to learn new skills and dramatically increases the success rate for automating high-value tasks.

The TactaBot Unlocks Robotics For High-Value Manufacturing

The TactaBot combines the Tacta Hand, Skill Capture, and Dexterous Intelligence system into one product that is finally able to take on the high-value, labor-intensive tasks that automation has never been able to perform. Those tasks include building precision electronics, seating connector cables, and assembling wire harnesses. Automating these tasks is vital to bringing advanced manufacturing back to the United States, especially at a time when the domestic workforce for this kind of skilled labor is shrinking.

TactaBot is scheduled to ship in early 2027 for deployment with initial customers across the electronics, AI infrastructure, and automotive manufacturing industries. Over time, Tacta plans to extend the same platform to higher-precision domains, including medical devices, aerospace, and defense.

A World-Class Team With Decades of Experience

Tacta was founded by a proven, multidisciplinary team with decades of experience in advanced manufacturing and robotics. Across the organization, Tacta team members have successfully developed, commercialized and scaled world-leading products in the precision manufacturing, sensing, and robotics industries. Between them, co-founders Andreas Bibl (Executive Chairman) and Vikram Pavate (CEO) have sold companies to Apple, Fujifilm, and Lockheed Martin.

Touch Unlocks A Trillion-Dollar Market in Robotics

“Everyone is talking about a trillion-dollar market for robots, but the technology isn’t there yet, because robots still can’t use their hands,” said Vikram Pavate, co-founder and CEO of Tacta Systems. “The hand is the hardest problem in robotics, and it can’t be solved without touch. We built the entire stack, the hands, the sensing, and the intelligence, so robots can finally do the physical work our economy depends on, and so we can start bringing that work home.”

“Nearly every major technology trend of the next decade will be built on hard tech, and dexterous manipulation is one of the hardest and most valuable problems in the space,” said Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner of Matter Venture Partners. “This is a team that has built and scaled category-defining hardware before, more than once. They are among the very few in the world capable of solving this, and they have clearly built the best robotic hands in the world.”

“Replicating the dexterity, sensitivity, and resilience of the human hand is the challenge that has long defined robotic manipulation. Tacta is unlocking this breakthrough by developing a full-stack solution enabling robots to perform complex, dexterous tasks that only human hands have been capable of. We’re excited to work alongside Tacta as they pioneer the future of robotic manipulation and enable new capabilities in industrial automation,” said Will Fung, Principal, Woven Capital.

About Tacta Systems

Tacta Systems™ is pioneering Dexterous Intelligence for robotics. Tacta’s first product, the TactaBot™, combines the Tacta Hand—the world’s most advanced robotic hand for manufacturing—along with the Tacta Glove Skill Capture system and a proprietary Dexterous Intelligence AI engine to bring human-level touch to robotics for the first time. The end result is technology that empowers robots to sense, adapt, and manipulate the physical world with human-like precision and speed. Based in Palo Alto, California, and founded by serial entrepreneurs who previously sold companies to Apple, Fujifilm, and Lockheed Martin, Tacta has raised $75 million from investors including Matter Venture Partners, America’s Frontier Fund, SoftBank, Woven Capital, B Capital, Yazaki Innovations Inc., EDBI, Sojitz Corporation, CDIB-TEN Capital, B5 Capital, and Tyche Partners. For more information, visit tactasystems.com.

Media Contact:
Haymaker Group
[email protected]

SOURCE Tacta Systems

Veteran of Meta, Google, and Uber joins the team building the leading AI roleplay platform following its $40M Series B and 1 million user milestone

SEATTLE, July 27, 2026 — Yoodli, the AI-powered experiential learning platform that uses AI roleplays to help teams practice high-stakes conversations, today announced the appointment of Kartik Murthy as Vice President of Product. Murthy officially joins the company July 27 and will lead product strategy and execution as Yoodli scales its platform for global revenue teams.

Murthy brings more than 17 years of product leadership spanning AI, consumer software, hardware, and learning. He joins Yoodli from Coalition, the cyber insurance leader, where as Head of Product for Security, AI, and Expansion he led teams that shipped generative AI features across the core product, automated more than 30% of servicing tasks, and expanded into five new markets, more than tripling international revenue. Previously, he led the product management team behind Ray-Ban Stories, Meta’s first wearable device, from inception through launch, drove Uber’s international expansion of Rides and Eats, and served as VP of Product at edtech platform Subject, making Yoodli a return to his roots in learning technology.

“At over 1 million users and 900% revenue growth, our constraint isn’t demand, it’s how fast we can build the right things. Kartik has spent his career solving exactly that problem, from launching Meta’s first wearable to tripling Coalition’s international revenue. He builds, he ships, and he thinks about product the way we do,” said Varun Puri, CEO and co-founder of Yoodli.

The appointment comes during a period of rapid growth for Yoodli., achieved 900% year-over-year revenue growth, and closed a $40M Series B led by WestBridge Capital, bringing total funding to $60M at a $300M valuation. Enterprise customers including Google Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks, and RingCentral use Yoodli’s AI roleplays to build readiness across revenue teams, with results like 15,000+ reps certified at Google Cloud and 1,600+ manager hours recovered per quarter at Snowflake.

“I’ve built products across AI, hardware, and learning, and the pattern I keep seeing is that people improve through practice, not content. Yoodli is the first experiential learning platform built for enterprise, and the team ships with a velocity I’ve rarely seen. There’s never been a better time to build, and there’s no better place to build than here,” said Murthy.

At Yoodli, Murthy will lead the product organization as the company scales its platform for the world’s largest revenue teams. His mandate includes deepening the realism of Yoodli’s AI roleplays, strengthening the platform’s enterprise capabilities, and expanding the Learn → Practice → Do loop across enablement, L&D, leadership, and partner teams.

Murthy is based in Seattle and will work from Yoodli’s headquarters at Pier 70.

About Yoodli

Yoodli is an AI-powered experiential learning platform that helps people practice and improve communication skills through personalized AI roleplays, adaptive coaching, and real-time feedback. Trusted by enterprises worldwide, Yoodli enables learners to build confidence, measure progress, and perform when it matters most. Learn more at yoodli.ai or visit us on LinkedIn. 

Welcoming Kartik Murthy as Yoodli’s VP of Product

We’re thrilled to share that Kartik Murthy is joining Yoodli as our VP of Product, effective July 27.

Kartik brings more than 17 years of product leadership across some of the most demanding consumer and enterprise environments in tech. Most recently, he was Head of Product for Security, AI, and Expansion at Coalition, the cyber insurance leader, where his teams shipped generative AI features across the core product, automated more than 30% of servicing tasks, and expanded into five new markets to more than triple the company’s international revenue. Before that, he was VP of Product at Subject, the edtech platform formerly known as Emile Learning, and spent over four years at Meta, where he led the product management team that took Ray-Ban Stories, Meta’s first wearable device, from inception to launch.

His resume also includes leading the cross-functional teams behind Uber’s global expansion of Rides and Eats, including launching Uber Eats in India and Korea, leading Quora’s first international expansion, product management on search internationalization at Google, and program management at Microsoft. He holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Why this matters for Yoodli

Yoodli is at an inflection point. We recently crossed 1 million all-time users, grew revenue 900% year over year, and raised a $40M Series B led by WestBridge Capital to bring AI roleplays to enterprise revenue teams around the world. As demand for experiential learning accelerates, our product roadmap has never been more ambitious.

That’s where Kartik comes in. He has spent his career building products that scale across markets, languages, and platforms, from zero-to-one hardware launches at Meta to global expansion at Uber. That combination of AI depth, enterprise rigor, and international scale is exactly what Yoodli needs as we grow our platform for the world’s largest revenue teams.

“We just crossed 1 million users and grew revenue 900% year over year, and honestly that’s the easy part. The hard part is what comes next: turning a product people love into a platform the world’s largest enterprises run their most important conversations on. Kartik has done this before. He took Meta’s first wearable from zero to launch, tripled Coalition’s international revenue, and built PM teams that use AI to move faster than anyone thought possible. He’s a builder first, and that’s the kind of product leader Yoodli needs at this stage,” said Varun Puri, CEO and co-founder of Yoodli.

In Kartik’s words

“The cost of building software is heading toward zero, which means the companies that win won’t be the ones that ship the most features. They’ll be the ones with the clearest conviction about what to build. Yoodli has that conviction: practice is how people get better at high-stakes conversations, and AI roleplays finally make practice scalable. I’ve spent my career on 0 to 1 products and global expansion, and before I ever talked to the team, I’d already built AI roleplay prototypes on my own weekends because I believe in this space that much. Joining Yoodli at this moment, with this team and this momentum, was an easy call.”

Kartik is based in Seattle, joining us at our Pier 70 headquarters, and we couldn’t be happier to have him leading product as we build the future of experiential learning.

Welcome to the team, Kartik.

Yoodli is a secure, experiential learning platform that uses AI roleplays to personalize real-life practice and transform how organizations learn and prepare. Learn more at yoodli.ai.

Media Contact:
Sage Quiamno
[email protected]
+18082321321

SOURCE Yoodli

New admin features unlock critical visibility into AI usage, customizable employee limits, model access controls, and company-wide spend caps

BOSTON, July 27, 2026 — CollectivIQ, the world’s first AI consensus platform for business intelligence, today announced new tiered pricing and enterprise control capabilities designed to help organizations manage their AI usage with greater visibility, accountability, and cost discipline.

Many enterprises are confronting runaway token consumption and unpredictable model costs. Gartner forecasts that enterprise AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion globally, a 47%  increase year-over-year, underscoring that AI has become one of the largest technology investments in the enterprise, and one that now requires stronger financial guardrails. CollectivIQ’s new pricing tiers and controls give business leaders a more practical way to monitor usage, manage costs, and track ROI, while responsibly scaling AI across their organization.

CollectivIQ unifies leading LLMs, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and others, into a single consensus-driven platform, enabling users to query multiple models at once and receive one synthesized, annotated answer. With its newest pricing and control features, CollectivIQ adds another layer of enterprise value by helping companies align AI usage with business priorities, employee needs, and budget requirements.

New pricing and control capabilities include:

• Model Tiering: CollectivIQ now organizes leading models into defined access tiers, giving companies a more structured way to balance performance and cost. Enterprise administrators can customize access by employee, including the ability to limit use of higher-cost or premium-tier models based on role, department, business need, or budget.
• Company-Wide and Individual Spend Caps: Administrators can set restrictions that apply to the entire organization to manage total AI spending and prevent unexpected usage spikes, while also establishing daily cost and token limits for individual employees, giving teams flexibility while maintaining clear boundaries around consumption.
• Employee and Company-Wide Usage Insights: CollectivIQ now gives leaders visibility into AI usage at both the employee and organizational level, allowing them to understand adoption patterns, identify high-value use cases, track tangible outcomes from AI use, and manage spending more effectively.
• Auto Mode: CollectivIQ can automatically select the appropriate model tier based on prompt complexity, helping teams avoid using premium models for simple tasks while preserving access to higher-performing models when the work demands it.

Together, these controls give enterprises a more complete and personalized operating model for AI adoption. Single-model systems often force companies into rigid contracts, closed ecosystems, limited integrations, rising costs, and a vendor roadmap that may no longer reflect their needs. They can also put company data, institutional knowledge, and long-term flexibility at risk. CollectivIQ gives organizations a different path, allowing employees to access the best models for the work at hand. At the same time, leaders retain the oversight needed to manage costs, reduce waste, protect enterprise intelligence, and scale AI responsibly.

“When we began deploying AI across our own organization, we needed to understand who was using which models, what they were spending, and where AI was creating real value,” said John Davie, CEO of CollectivIQ and Buyers Edge Platform. “We could not find a platform designed for that level of oversight, so we built it. These new pricing tiers and controls give enterprise leaders a practical way to manage AI spend while preserving employees’ access to the best tools for their specific tasks.”

This release is the latest expansion in CollectivIQ’s role as the controlled intelligence layer for enterprise AI. The platform’s multi-model consensus approach helps businesses compare outputs from leading LLMs, surface disagreements, identify bias, and reduce the risk of hallucinations before decisions are made. By pairing that intelligence layer with tiered pricing, spending caps, usage analytics, and background activity controls, CollectivIQ now gives companies a more governed way to deploy AI across the workforce while giving enterprises a clearer command of the economics, accuracy, and accountability required to scale AI effectively.

About CollectivIQ

CollectivIQ is the intelligence layer for the AI era, unifying leading LLMs into a single consensus-driven platform that delivers more accurate, secure, and cost-efficient insight. Founded by the leadership team behind Buyers Edge Platform, CollectivIQ was built to bring accountability, governance, and economic alignment to enterprise AI adoption. Learn more at www.collectiviq.ai.

SOURCE CollectivIQ

Betting on AI services over software, Freight Hero executes brokers’ back-office work with AI Agents, backed by human Heroes

DURHAM, N.C., July 27, 2026 — Freight Hero, an AI company that fully manages freight brokers’ back-office operations, has closed a $5 million seed round. The round was led by Field Ventures, with Flybridge Capital, Tip Top VC and Front Porch Venture Partners joining in.

Freight brokerage is a $19 billion industry bleeding margins. The Great Freight Recession, overcapacity, soft spot rates, and climbing insurance, labor and tech costs turned a slow decline into a real threat. Technology was supposed to be the fix. In fact, 41% of brokers already use some form of AI or automation, per Truckstop.com. So far, it hasn’t worked.

“Everyone in this industry is selling AI as a technology product, and that’s the mistake,” said André Luis Martins Filho, founder and CEO of Freight Hero. “When you sell broker software and promise results, you’re handing them the responsibility to make it work. ROI depends on implementation, adoption and change management, which are hard to get right. We do the opposite. Brokers pay a flat fee per load, and we run it end-to-end as an extension of their team. If it doesn’t run efficiently, that’s on us.”

Freight brokerage runs on exceptions, and Freight Hero was built around that reality. The company owns the full lifecycle of each load, from rate confirmation through proof of delivery, inside the systems brokers already use. AI agents handle more than 90% of customer load touches, while a trained team of operators, the Heroes, steps in whenever a situation calls for judgment, like an upset driver demanding a human call or a data discrepancy that needs untangling.

Selling outcomes instead of software is one of the most-watched shifts in venture capital right now. Sequoia’s thesis, Services: The New Software, argues the next generation of defining companies will sell finished work, not tools, a view Y Combinator and others share. VCs such as Field have been calling the model Service-as-a-Software or AI Native Services. This is perfect for industries like Freight brokerage: operationally brutal, relationship-driven and run by people whose job is moving freight, not managing technology.
 

“Traditional industries like freight brokerage don’t have large software budgets, but instead have enormous labor budgets,” said Jillian Williams, Partner at Field Ventures. “AI alone struggles to properly serve these markets because of the operational complexity. Freight Hero reduces that friction by focusing on outcomes, doing the work for the customer rather than giving them a tool. We believe this model defines this next era of innovation, and Andre is exactly the kind of domain expert we need to build it.”

By the end of July, Freight Hero will have managed more than 50,000 loads and handled millions of carrier communications. Customers have turned fixed labor costs into variable ones, lifted service quality, and are tracking toward 100%+ ROI. Ally Logistics, a fast-growing Michigan brokerage that holds vendors to a hard line, brought Freight Hero in early to automate track-and-trace.

“Track and trace is one of the areas in brokerage operations with the most human touches and manual interventions,” said Dan Manshaem, CEO of Ally Logistics. “It’s very hard to automate due to the depth of nuance that exists in the process. Freight Hero’s team has consistently been willing to build that depth into their system. The results speak for themselves: they’re now fielding the vast majority of all touches on our loads post rate confirmation. We’ve grown our revenue by 82.4% year-over-year without meaningfully increasing operations headcount. Freight Hero was certainly one of the enablers of that.”

With the new funding, Freight Hero will expand its go-to-market efforts, grow its engineering and operations teams and deepen its service into adjacent functions, increasing Freight Hero’s scope towards billing, accounting and carrier sales.

“Freight brokerage was built on trust, on carriers and brokers who knew they could count on each other,” said Ted Alling, co-founder of Dynamo Ventures, former CEO of Access America Transport and an early Freight Hero investor. “Two decades of paperwork and tracking buried that trust. Logistics is full of businesses too relational to fully automate, too heavy to run without help. Freight Hero is the first company to nail that balance. I believe the model holds up across the whole industry, not just brokerage.”

Freight Hero has raised more than $6 million in funding to date. To learn more about how the company helps freight brokers automate their back offices, visit freighthero.ai.

About Freight Hero
Freight Hero fully manages the back-office operations of freight brokerages, combining AI automation with a dedicated team of human operators to guarantee operational outcomes rather than sell software. Founded by André Luis Martins Filho, Freight Hero serves mid-market freight brokerages and is backed by Field Ventures, Flybridge Capital, Dynamo Ventures, the AI Fund and other investors.

Media Contact
Ryan Hecker
PANBlast for Freight Hero
[email protected]

SOURCE Freight Hero