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

Financing to meet rapidly growing commercial demand for proprietary ClarosTechUV™ technology and support expansion of ClarosLabs™ mobile laboratory, following breakthrough PFAS groundwater remediation results and tightening global PFAS regulations.

MINNEAPOLIS, July 28, 2026 — Claros Technologies, Inc. (Claros), a global leader in destruction and analytical solutions for PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as “forever chemicals” — today announced the successful closing of a $55 million Series B financing, inclusive of the company’s previously announced convertible note financing. The financing will accelerate the global commercialization of the proprietary ClarosTechUV™ PFAS Destruction System, expand ClarosLabs™, strengthen manufacturing and operations, and support growing demand from industrial manufacturers, remediation firms, utilities, and government agencies seeking permanent PFAS destruction and advanced analytical solutions.

The Series B financing was led by Treehouse Family Capital LLC, with participation from Daikin America, Inc., Veralto, Bush Foundation, Nord Asset Management, and Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, together with continued support from existing investors. The financing brought together a diverse group of institutional and strategic investors from across the industrial, environmental, and technology ecosystem, reflecting broad recognition of Claros’ commercial momentum, differentiated technology platform, and the significant global opportunity emerging around permanent PFAS destruction and analytical solutions.

Claros’ technology supports the continued use of PFAS in critical applications across key industries, including semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, among others, while enabling the destruction of PFAS at an industrial scale. The result is a solution that advances both innovation and environmental stewardship.

The financing will support expanded manufacturing capacity, additional commercial deployments throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, continued product development, expansion of ClarosLabs™, strategic hiring across engineering and commercial operations, and ongoing investment in customer support and application development. The financing positions Claros to meet accelerating global demand as industries and governments increasingly transition from PFAS management toward permanent destruction technologies.

Michelle Bellanca, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Claros Technologies, underscored the significance of the company’s recent momentum and the capital secured to support its next phase of growth:

“Over the past year, Claros has crossed the threshold from breakthrough technology to successful commercial reality. Our work with major industrial manufacturers has demonstrated that permanent destruction of all targeted PFAS species can operate reliably, efficiently and cost-effectively at commercial scale, while our recent groundwater remediation results have shown that the same technology performs exceptionally well across complex environmental applications. Coupled with the rapid evolution and implementation of PFAS regulations around the world, these milestones have fundamentally expanded our opportunity. This financing gives us the resources to accelerate commercial deployments globally, continue advancing our technology, and help customers address one of the world’s most significant environmental challenges.”

Jack Cogen, Manager of Treehouse Family Capital LLC, added:

“The most exciting technology companies eventually reach an inflection point where the question is no longer whether the technology works, but how quickly it can be deployed at scale. We believe Claros has reached that point. Claros has demonstrated that its technology is effective under real-world commercial conditions. Claros has built an integrated platform that combines PFAS destruction with analytical services and is scaling commercially at exactly the right time. With regulatory momentum accelerating around the world, we see an opportunity to help build one of the defining environmental technology companies of the next decade and beyond.”

Claros has achieved several key commercial milestones that have established ClarosTechUV™ as the leading field-proven PFAS destruction technology. In December 2025, the company, in partnership with Daikin America, successfully completed one of the world’s largest in-field PFAS destruction demonstrations of industrial process water while achieving greater than 99.99% destruction across long-, short-, and ultra-short chain PFAS compounds. In April 2026, Claros demonstrated ≥99.99% destruction of targeted PFAS compounds in groundwater remediation applications using concentrate derived from approximately one million gallons (3.8 million liters) of groundwater, validating the scalability of the technology across both industrial manufacturing and environmental remediation applications.

Together, these milestones mark Claros’ transition from commercial validation to broad market deployment, positioning the company to commercially offer its integrated PFAS destruction and analytical services platform across industrial manufacturing, environmental remediation, and regulatory compliance markets worldwide.

The financing comes as the global regulatory landscape surrounding PFAS continues to evolve rapidly. In Europe, policymakers are advancing broad PFAS restrictions under the proposed REACH Regulation framework while evaluating sector-specific exemptions for essential uses. In the United States, federal and state agencies continue expanding drinking water standards, industrial discharge requirements, and remediation programs. As these regulatory requirements become more comprehensive, organizations are increasingly seeking not only permanent PFAS destruction technologies, but also advanced analytical services capable of accurately detecting, quantifying, and documenting PFAS to support regulatory compliance. Together, these converging trends are driving demand for both the ClarosTechUV™ PFAS destruction technology and ClarosLabs™, the company’s PFAS analytical services offering.

About Claros Technologies

Founded in 2018 and based in the United States in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Claros Technologies is a global leader in PFAS mitigation, with two core divisions. The ClarosTech™ division focuses exclusively on the permanent destruction of PFAS, offering affordable, high-flow, scalable, and field-ready systems that destroy long, short, and ultra-short chain PFAS compounds. ClarosLabs™, the company’s ISO/IEC 17025:2017 accredited analytical division, is a leading commercial laboratory dedicated solely to PFAS detection, quantification, and exposure assessment. Claros is on a mission to eliminate PFAS from the environment. Claros is taking the ‘forever’ out of “forever chemicals” and destroying PFAS for good.

Media Contact
Kari Finkler
[email protected]

– Claros Technologies recauda 55 millones de dólares en financiación Serie B para acelerar la comercialización global de su tecnología de destrucción de PFAS

Esta financiación busca satisfacer la creciente demanda comercial de la tecnología patentada ClarosTechUV™ y respaldar la expansión del laboratorio móvil ClarosLabs™, tras los innovadores resultados en la remediación de aguas subterráneas contaminadas con PFAS y el endurecimiento de las regulaciones globales sobre PFAS

MINNEAPOLIS, 28 de julio de 2026 — Claros Technologies, Inc. (Claros), líder mundial en soluciones de destrucción y análisis de PFAS (sustancias perfluoroalquiladas y polifluoroalquiladas, comúnmente conocidas como “sustancias químicas permanentes”), ha informado hoy del éxito en el cierre de una ronda de financiación Serie B de 55 millones de dólares, que incluye la financiación mediante pagarés convertibles anunciada previamente por la compañía. Esta financiación va a servir para poder acelerar la comercialización global del sistema patentado de destrucción de PFAS ClarosTechUV™, ampliar ClarosLabs™, fortalecer la fabricación y las operaciones, y respaldar la creciente demanda de fabricantes industriales, empresas de remediación, servicios públicos y agencias gubernamentales que buscan la destrucción permanente de PFAS y soluciones analíticas avanzadas.

La ronda de financiación Serie B fue liderada por Treehouse Family Capital LLC, con la participación de Daikin America, Inc., Veralto, Bush Foundation, Nord Asset Management y Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, además del apoyo continuo de los inversores existentes. Esta financiación reunió a un grupo diverso de inversores institucionales y estratégicos de los sectores industrial, medioambiental y tecnológico, un reflejo del amplio reconocimiento del dinamismo comercial de Claros, su plataforma tecnológica diferenciada y la importante oportunidad global que surge en torno a la destrucción permanente de PFAS y las soluciones analíticas.

La tecnología de Claros permite el uso continuado de PFAS en aplicaciones críticas en sectores clave, como la fabricación de semiconductores, la industria aeroespacial, la farmacéutica y la sanitaria, entre otras, al tiempo que posibilita la destrucción de PFAS a escala industrial. El resultado es una solución que impulsa tanto la innovación como la protección del medio ambiente.

La financiación permitirá ampliar la capacidad de fabricación, realizar despliegues comerciales adicionales en Norteamérica, Europa y Asia, continuar el desarrollo de productos, expandir ClarosLabs™, contratar estratégicamente personal para las áreas de ingeniería y operaciones comerciales, e invertir continuamente en atención al cliente y desarrollo de aplicaciones. Esta financiación posiciona a Claros para satisfacer la creciente demanda global, a medida que las industrias y los gobiernos transitan cada vez más de la gestión de PFAS hacia tecnologías de destrucción permanente.

Michelle Bellanca, consejera delegada y cofundadora de Claros Technologies, destacó la importancia del reciente impulso de la empresa y el capital obtenido para respaldar su próxima fase de crecimiento:

“Durante el último año, Claros ha dado el salto de la tecnología innovadora a una exitosa realidad comercial. Nuestro trabajo con importantes fabricantes industriales ha demostrado que la destrucción permanente de todas las especies de PFAS objetivo puede operar de manera confiable, eficiente y rentable a escala comercial, mientras que nuestros recientes resultados en la remediación de aguas subterráneas han demostrado que la misma tecnología funciona excepcionalmente bien en aplicaciones ambientales complejas. Junto con la rápida evolución e implementación de las regulaciones sobre PFAS en todo el mundo, estos hitos han ampliado fundamentalmente nuestras oportunidades. Esta financiación nos proporciona los recursos para acelerar los despliegues comerciales a nivel mundial, continuar avanzando en nuestra tecnología y ayudar a nuestros clientes a abordar uno de los desafíos ambientales más importantes del mundo”.

Jack Cogen, responsable de Treehouse Family Capital LLC, añadió:

“Las empresas tecnológicas más prometedoras llegan a un punto de inflexión donde la pregunta ya no es si la tecnología funciona, sino con qué rapidez puede implementarse a gran escala. Creemos que Claros ha alcanzado ese punto. Claros ha demostrado la eficacia de su tecnología en condiciones comerciales reales. Ha desarrollado una plataforma integrada que combina la destrucción de PFAS con servicios analíticos y está expandiéndose comercialmente en el momento preciso. Con el impulso normativo acelerándose en todo el mundo, vemos la oportunidad de contribuir a la creación de una de las empresas de tecnología ambiental más importantes de la próxima década y más allá”.

Claros ha alcanzado varios hitos comerciales clave que han consolidado a ClarosTechUV™ como la tecnología líder y probada en campo para la destrucción de PFAS. En diciembre de 2025, la compañía, en colaboración con Daikin America, completó con éxito una de las mayores demostraciones mundiales de destrucción de PFAS en aguas de procesos industriales, logrando una destrucción superior al 99,99% en compuestos PFAS de cadena larga, corta y ultracorta. En abril de 2026, Claros demostró una destrucción ≥99,99% de compuestos PFAS específicos en aplicaciones de remediación de aguas subterráneas utilizando un concentrado derivado de aproximadamente un millón de galones (3,8 millones de litros) de agua subterránea, lo que valida la escalabilidad de la tecnología tanto en la fabricación industrial como en aplicaciones de remediación ambiental.

De forma conjunta, estos hitos marcan la transición de Claros desde la validación comercial hasta su amplia implementación en el mercado, lo que la posiciona para ofrecer comercialmente su plataforma integrada de destrucción de PFAS y servicios analíticos en los mercados de fabricación industrial, remediación ambiental y cumplimiento normativo a nivel mundial.

La financiación se produce en un momento en que el panorama normativo global en torno a los PFAS continúa evolucionando rápidamente. En Europa, los responsables políticos están impulsando amplias restricciones a los PFAS bajo el marco propuesto del Reglamento REACH, al tiempo que evalúan exenciones específicas para usos esenciales. En Estados Unidos, las agencias federales y estatales siguen ampliando los estándares de agua potable, los requisitos de descarga industrial y los programas de remediación. A medida que estos requisitos normativos se vuelven más exhaustivos, las organizaciones buscan cada vez más no solo tecnologías de destrucción permanente de PFAS, sino también servicios analíticos avanzados capaces de detectar, cuantificar y documentar con precisión los PFAS para respaldar el cumplimiento normativo. En conjunto, estas tendencias convergentes impulsan la demanda tanto de la tecnología de destrucción de PFAS ClarosTechUV™ como de ClarosLabs™, la oferta de servicios analíticos de PFAS de la compañía.

Acerca de Claros Technologies

Fundada en 2018 y con sede en Minneapolis, Minnesota, Estados Unidos, Claros Technologies es líder mundial en la mitigación de PFAS, con dos divisiones principales. La división ClarosTech™ se centra exclusivamente en la destrucción permanente de PFAS, ofreciendo sistemas asequibles, de alto caudal, escalables y listos para su uso en campo que destruyen compuestos PFAS de cadena larga, corta y ultracorta. ClarosLabs™, la división analítica de la compañía acreditada según la norma ISO/IEC 17025:2017, es un laboratorio comercial líder dedicado exclusivamente a la detección, cuantificación y evaluación de la exposición a PFAS. La misión de Claros es eliminar los PFAS del medio ambiente. Claros está eliminando la persistencia de los PFAS y destruyéndolos definitivamente.

Contacto para medios
Kari Finkler
[email protected]

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