Former TimePayment CFO joins Byzfunder, one of the fastest-growing small-business lenders, with more than $2 billion funded across over 35,000 businesses.

NEW YORK, Oct. 27, 2026 — Byzfunder, a small-business lender, today announced the appointment of Filippo Guidi as Chief Strategy Officer. Mr. Guidi joined the company in October 2026 and will oversee capital markets, strategic planning, and ventures and partnerships.

Mr. Guidi brings more than twenty years in finance across operating, banking and investing roles. Most recently he was Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer of TimePayment, a micro-ticket equipment lessor, where he led the company’s sale from Fortress Investment Group to BasePoint Capital. Earlier he was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and Evercore Partners, and an investor at Silver Point Capital and Madison Dearborn Partners. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics with honors from the University of Chicago.

Mr. Guidi’s appointment reflects Byzfunder’s commitment to expanding its reach in the small-business lending market and securing a larger, more diversified base of institutional funding. His mandate is to deepen capital-markets relationships, strategic planning and develop strategic partnerships that support the company’s next stage of growth.

“Our next phase of growth is about expanding our reach in small-business lending and securing the capital to support it,” said Ilya Fridman, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Byzfunder. “Filippo has sat where our investors sit, and he has run the finance function of a lender at scale. That experience is exactly what we need as we build the capital structure to support Byzfunder’s next stage of growth.”

“Byzfunder has the two things that are hard to build and easy to claim: real origination volume and real underwriting data.” said Mr. Guidi. “More than $2 billion funded across over 35,000 businesses is not a pitch deck, it is a track record, and it is the basis for a serious conversation with institutional capital. My job is to turn that record into durable, diversified funding and into partnerships that reach small businesses the banks have stopped serving.”

Byzfunder provides financing to small and medium-sized businesses, including directly from its own balance sheet, with underwriting driven by business performance rather than credit score alone. Mr. Guidi’s responsibilities span the full capital stack — securitization, warehouse and forward-flow relationships — alongside strategic ventures, partnerships, and strategic planning, including the financial planning and analysis function that measures them.

In 2026, Byzfunder closed its inaugural $170 million KBRA-rated asset-backed securitization.

About Byzfunder

Byzfunder is a small-business lender providing working capital to small and medium-sized businesses across the United States. Founded in 2019, the company has funded more than $2 billion across over 35,000 businesses. Businesses can apply online and may receive funding the same business day.

For more information, visit byzfunder.com.

Media Contact
Xin Hamilton, CMO
[email protected]
byzfunder.com

SOURCE Byzfunder

Astradis now runs the data engine behind every pipeline, so defensible numbers arrive in weeks. In January 2027, it goes headless.

CHICAGO, Oct. 27, 2026 — Teragonia today announced new Astradis™ capabilities and the general availability of Talk2Astra, its conversational intelligence agent.

PE-backed companies face a similar problem: answers exist, but they’re scattered across disparate systems. A question that should take seconds takes days, and can’t be defended to a board. The usual fix, a warehouse build, takes up to 18 months, nearly a third of a five-year hold. Astradis connects scattered data to the P&L in one governed foundation and now runs the data engine in a single portal, with pipelines running on schedule or whenever new data arrives.

“Data readiness is the hardest part of deploying AI that works,” said Thomas Thayyil Thomas, CEO and Founder of Teragonia. “Astradis builds a four-layer data foundation within weeks, so results show up in EBITDA immediately.”

Astradis connects systems through 700+ prebuilt connectors and turns contracts, invoices, and emails into governed data. Its patent-pending Data Modeling Autopilot drafts the data model for expert approval, compressing months into weeks. A shared ontology and knowledge graph let AI reason over the business, with answers scored and traceable.

“Connecting an AI model to company data is the easy part,” said Dr. Sai Mali Ananthanarayanan, Chief AI Officer and Co-Founder. “Trust comes from the foundation underneath, so leaders can explain exactly how a number was calculated.”

With Talk2Astra, an executive asks in plain English, such as which active recalls lack a documented protocol response, and gets the figure, source, definitions, and next steps. Unlike general-purpose assistants, Talk2Astra answers on your business.

Coming January 2027, Astradis goes headless. Astradis MCP opens governed data, metrics and ontology to the tools a company already uses, so executives get defensible answers where they work and can choose best-of-breed tools freely.

Astradis deploys in as little as 48 hours. Core systems connect within two weeks. By week three, your raw data is mapped to the KPIs you run the business on.

Email [email protected] or visit teragonia.com/astradis-platform to learn more.

About Teragonia

Teragonia’s mission is speed to value at PE velocity. Teragonia turns private equity value creation playbooks into agents that drive the operating rhythm of mid-market businesses within commercial, operations and finance functions.

Media contact
Chelsey Krull
[email protected]

SOURCE Teragonia

Strategic investment by Stormbreaker Ventures brings total funding to $9 million as the company
expands its proprietary sensor data from live sports into physical AI, robotics and intelligent systems

RIVERSIDE, Calif., Oct. 27, 2026 — EDGE Sound Research, the company building perception infrastructure for AI to understand the physical world, today announced an additional $2 million in funding led by Stormbreaker Ventures, bringing total funding to $9 million. The new capital will fund continued deployments with live sports broadcasters, leagues and venues, expansion of its proprietary multimodal sensor data, and development of new applications for physical AI, robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments.

As AI moves into robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments, its ability to understand and act in the real world depends on not just what a camera sees, but on what else is happening around it. Real-world environments are noisy and sound provides valuable context, including activity outside a camera’s view.

EDGE Sound is building perception infrastructure that isolates useful sounds and combines them with other sensor data to help systems interpret what is happening in real time. Its platform captures signals from microphones and sensor arrays already installed in a space, isolates individual sources and events out of overlapping noise, and fuses them with video, tracking, timing and location data. The output is a structured, real-time picture of a scene: what happened, where, when and to which object. In sports, for example, those outputs can allow a broadcaster to automatically follow an individual player’s audio throughout a game. And rather than replacing the cameras, trackers and sensors an operator already owns, EDGE Sound connects them into a single interpretation layer.

Live sports gave EDGE an immediate commercial market while allowing the company to develop and validate its perception technology in some of the most complex, noisy real-world environments. Its Virtual Sound Engine is already deployed commercially across live sports, with customers and partners including Shure, the NBA, Fox Sports, the United States Tennis Association and others.

“Today’s robots and intelligent systems are like toddlers. They can reason at a high-level, but they don’t consider their full surroundings before making a decision,” said Valtteri Salomaki, co-founder and CEO of EDGE Sound Research. “Toddlers grow by combining what they hear, see and feel, then learning from what happens next. Machines don’t have that loop yet. We started with sound because it’s the signal most systems throw away, and solving it forced us to connect every other sensor in the room. A broadcaster following one player through a game and a robot knowing something happened behind it are the same problem.”

EDGE Sound’s approach grew out of doctoral research at the University of California, Riverside, where co-founders Valtteri Salomaki and Dr. Ethan Castro approached sound from two different perspectives. Castro, who was born hard of hearing and became a professional musician and composer, studied how people perceive their surroundings through hearing and physical vibration. Salomaki, whose background includes information systems, marketing and emerging technologies, viewed sound as a source of data. Together, those perspectives became the foundation for EDGE’s approach to perception.

“Every conversation about physical AI runs into the same wall. The models and the robots are ready, but the underlying systems cannot reliably tell what is happening in real time,” said Said Mia, Founder and Managing Partner at Stormbreaker Ventures. “EDGE is building that perception layer, and building it with paying customers in one of the most acoustically hostile environments there is. The team spent years on how humans actually understand their surroundings, and they are turning that into the infrastructure physical AI desperately needs.”

To learn more about EDGE Sound Research, visit www.edgesoundresearch.com.

About EDGE Sound Research

EDGE Sound Research builds perception infrastructure that helps computers understand the physical world by combining sound with video, tracking, timing, location and other sensor data. Its platform isolates individual sounds and events from noisy real-world settings and connects them with the broader context of an environment. Founded in 2020 out of research at the University of California, Riverside, EDGE works with leagues, broadcasters, venues and technology partners including the NBA, Fox Sports, the United States Tennis Association and Shure, and is extending its software to broader applications in physical AI, robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments. For more information, visit www.edgesoundresearch.com.

About Stormbreaker Ventures

Stormbreaker Ventures is an early-stage venture firm investing in the connectivity infrastructure powering AI, including Open RAN and AI-RAN, private 5G, satellite-cellular convergence, edge compute, IoT, connected mobility, and U.S. manufacturing modernization. Led by veteran operators and founders like Glenn Lurie, former President and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Operations; Wade Oosterman, founder of Clearnet Communications; Derek Aberle, former President of Qualcomm; and Andy Funk, a three-time founder who built and sold Virtela and OverWatchID, Stormbreaker brings decades of experience building and scaling category-defining companies across telecommunications, mobility and enterprise technology. For more information, visit www.stormbreaker.vc.

Media Contact

BAM for Stormbreaker
[email protected] 

SOURCE EDGE Sound Research

MIAMI, Oct. 27, 2026 — Bizcap, a global fintech providing fast, flexible funding to small and medium-sized businesses, today announced the closing of a $175 million credit facility with a leading US institutional credit manager, strengthening its capacity to expand across the United States and Canada.

The facility marks another milestone in Bizcap’s international growth, as the company continues to invest heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), proprietary technology and operational infrastructure to support its expanding global operations.

Founded in Australia in 2019, Bizcap has expanded into eight countries and provided more than $5 billion in funding to over 100,000 businesses worldwide. Its growth has been driven by a combination of technology, local market expertise and an open-minded approach to underwriting businesses requiring fast, flexible funding.

The new facility will provide additional funding capacity to support increased originations and continued product expansion across North America, enabling Bizcap to serve more businesses seeking fast, flexible alternatives to traditional financing.

Alongside its international expansion, Bizcap has committed substantial resources to developing its proprietary AI and machine learning capabilities, with a focus on strengthening credit decisioning, improving operational efficiency and supporting faster, more informed funding decisions.

Executive commentary

“This is a major milestone for Bizcap and an exciting step in our North American growth,” said Albert Gahfi, Chief Executive Officer of Bizcap.

“Since launching seven years ago, we’ve built a global business that has funded more than 100,000 businesses across multiple international markets. We’ve achieved that by looking beyond traditional credit metrics, combining technology and data with a deeper understanding of each business to identify opportunities that other lenders might overlook.

“We’ve also invested heavily in AI and proprietary technology because we believe the future of business financing is about making better decisions, faster, while maintaining a personal and practical approach.

“This facility gives us the capacity to bring that approach to more businesses across the US and Canada, while continuing to invest in the technology, products and people driving our growth.”

“Our international expansion has been supported by a consistent approach to underwriting criteria, risk management and governance,” said Mendy Piekarski, Chief Legal Officer of Bizcap.

“This facility provides additional capacity to support our North American operations as we continue to scale, while maintaining the established risk management and underwriting practices that underpin our business.”

Brean Capital, LLC served as Bizcap’s exclusive financial advisor and sole placement agent in connection with the transaction.

About Bizcap

Founded in Australia in 2019, Bizcap is a global fintech specializing in fast, flexible funding solutions to small and medium-sized businesses across North America, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Combining an open-minded approach to business funding with proprietary technology, data-driven underwriting and local market expertise, Bizcap helps businesses access capital beyond traditional financing options.

Bizcap has provided more than $5 billion in funding to over 100,000 businesses worldwide.

For more information, visit bizcapfunding.com.

Media contact
[email protected]

SOURCE Bizcap

Solution shaped by years of work alongside community foundations, including Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct. 27, 2026 — Kindsight, the leader in enterprise fundraising and donor intelligence software, today introduced Kindsight for Foundations, a new solution built for community foundations. The solution pairs grants management built directly into Kindsight’s Ascend CRM with a new Fundholder and Grantee Portal, so community foundations can run grantmaking, fundholder engagement, and grantee collaboration as one connected experience.

Community foundations work in two directions at once: attracting donors and fundholders, and moving money out to the nonprofits their communities depend on. As competition for new fundholders grows, foundations need technology that supports both sides of that work equally well, delivering engaging donor experiences while giving staff a connected view of grants, donors, and funds in one place.

This is where Kindsight excels: providing powerful, configurable, user-friendly solutions for complex fundraising needs. For decades, Kindsight has helped large fundraising organizations—with complex funds, programs, and donor relationships—run high-volume operations on a single platform. At Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), Ascend has helped improve and streamline gift processing. Kindsight for Foundations applies that experience, and what SVCF and other community foundation clients have taught Kindsight.

“We have been a Kindsight Ascend customer for the past two years, and its Salesforce-based platform has helped us improve and streamline our gift processing. Community foundations have increasingly sophisticated needs across donor engagement, grantmaking, data, operations, and digital experiences, and we have been impressed by Kindsight’s willingness to listen closely to practitioners and incorporate their perspectives as it continues to evolve its platform,” said To Tsang, Senior Vice President, Information Technology & Knowledge Management at Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

“We are excited to contribute our experience and insights to that evolution, particularly as Kindsight develops the next generation of donor and grantee digital experiences for community foundations. We look forward to seeing these capabilities continue to evolve and create greater value for the philanthropic sector.”

Kindsight for Foundations is designed to deliver:

• Grant lifecycle management on one system of record. Grants management within the Ascend CRM covers intake, review, approval, award, disbursement tracking, and post-award reporting, with fund restrictions and approval routing enforced inside the workflow. Candid (Charity Check) data is included, so nonprofit validation happens in the workflow rather than in a separate lookup.
• A modern, online experience for fundholders. The Fundholder Portal gives fundholders self-service access to fund information, grant recommendations, statements, and documents. Behind it, Ascend’s Constituent 360 unifies each donor’s giving history, relationships, and engagement into one record, and iWave prospect research adds capacity, propensity, and affinity signals so donor services teams know which fundholders are ready for a larger commitment.
• A clearer path for grantees. The Grantee Portal gives nonprofit applicants one place to apply, upload documents, check status, and submit reports.

Because the Ascend CRM is built on the Salesforce platform, foundations inherit Salesforce’s enterprise security, permissioning, and open ecosystem without maintaining a custom solution. A Business Rules Engine, custom fields, and reports and dashboards let staff configure fund rules and give leadership visibility across funds, grants, donors, and nonprofits without customizations. Meanwhile, Kindsight Intelligence drafts fundholder and grantee correspondence, summarizes records, and cleans up contact reports to free up staff time for strategic work.

“Community foundations need connected technology to support donor relationships, fund stewardship, and grantmaking,” said Hemant Kashyap, Kindsight’s Chief Product Officer. “Kindsight for Foundations gives them one record for the donor, the fund, and the grant, and a digital experience that gives fundholders a reason to keep their giving local.”

Kindsight for Foundations is expected to be available in early 2027 for early-access Community Foundation partners. Kindsight will preview Kindsight for Foundations at TAG2026, November 10-13, followed by a live webinar on November 17 at 1:00 p.m. ET.

Press contact: [email protected]

About Kindsight

Kindsight builds AI-powered technology that helps fundraising teams make a difference, taking away the routine tasks so they can focus on the relationships that drive giving. Founded on over three decades of innovation and trusted by more than 4,500 organizations worldwide, Kindsight is the market leader in advancement and fundraising software, supporting the education, healthcare, and nonprofit sectors.

Kindsight’s product suite includes Ascend, an enterprise fundraising CRM, and AdvancementRM, a specialized advancement CRM, both built on Salesforce; iWave, a prospect research and wealth screening solution; Connect, an integrated constituent portal; and Kindsight Intelligence, a collection of fundraising AI capabilities and agents embedded across Kindsight’s applications that fundraisers direct and supervise at every step. Together, they help organizations discover the right donors, inspire personal connections at scale, and grow giving year after year, keeping fundraising human while helping teams accomplish more. Learn more at kindsight.io.

SOURCE Kindsight

Purpose-built infrastructure for onboarding, compliance, IP protection, and global compensation

• Niural AI expands workforce platform by introducing Expert Verifier, a novel category observed by the need for organizations to verify AI-generated work.
• Through this launch, Niural AI gives any organization building AI models the infrastructure necessary to manage this emerging workforce segment.
• Niural AI continues to architect the underlying permissions, compliance, and payment systems required for modern, technology-enabled teams.

NEW YORK, Oct. 27, 2026 — Niural AI, the AI-native global workforce and payments platform that powers every employment model, today announced the launch of the industry’s first dedicated infrastructure for Expert Verifiers, the rapidly growing workforce of credentialed domain experts contributing to AI model training, post-training, and evaluation.

As frontier AI advances beyond traditional annotation into sophisticated post-training and evaluation, demand for specialized human expertise is accelerating. Models increasingly rely on doctors, lawyers, scientists, and other domain experts to evaluate complex reasoning and improve performance. Yet AI companies still manage these highly skilled professionals through fragmented systems built for crowdsourcing and gig work, creating significant worker classification, tax, intellectual property, and operational risks.

Niural AI eliminates this bottleneck by introducing Expert Verifier as a first-class operational role within its global workforce platform, sitting alongside W-2 employees, international hires, and traditional contractors.

Purpose-Built for AI Evaluation Workflows

The launch introduces specialized capabilities built specifically for task-based and project-based AI evaluation:

• High-Trust Global Onboarding & IP Governance: Streamlined onboarding workflows that handle international worker verification, strict non-disclosure agreements, and airtight IP assignment, ensuring proprietary model training data remains protected.
• Dynamic Payment & Settlement Engines: Full support for hourly, task-based, and pay-on-demand settlement across supported global markets, allowing AI teams to compensate specialists immediately upon task verification.
• Automated Cross-Border Tax & Compliance: Built-in tax collection (W-8/W-9) and localized payout rails that eliminate worker misclassification risks for short-term or on-demand expert engagements.
• Unified Enterprise Governance: A single dashboard giving legal, finance, and AI engineering leads visibility into active verifier contracts, total evaluation spend, and global compliance status.

“The AI data industry is undergoing a fundamental shift,” said Nami Baral, founder and CEO of Niural AI. “As models get more capable, the work required to improve them is moving beyond traditional annotation into expert reasoning, verification, and increasingly complex post-training environments. The people doing this work are doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and specialists whose expertise can determine what a model is capable of doing next.

“But the infrastructure hasn’t kept up. You cannot build a global market for high-value human intelligence on payment links and generic contractor workflows. These engagements raise entirely different questions around classification, credentials, intellectual property, taxation, and compensation. At Niural, we’re building the financial and workforce infrastructure for this emerging economy, so AI companies can focus on advancing their models rather than figuring out how to engage and pay the humans making that progress possible.”

Powering the Next Composition of the Workforce
The launch marks a core milestone in Niural AI’s broader product strategy. Informed by research from Niural AI Labs, the platform is architecting the governance layer for a new generation of work, extending beyond traditional employees and contractors to specialized human experts powering AI post-training and autonomous AI agents.

The Expert Verifier capabilities are available immediately to all Niural AI enterprise clients worldwide. To learn more or request platform access, visit niural.com.

About Niural AI
Niural AI is the smartest people platform ever built. In one system, businesses of any size can build and manage their teams globally across any employment model, from payroll to PEO, ASO, EOR, Contractors, and Expert Verifiers.

Built AI-native from the ground up, a company can start with any product and utilize them without migrating employee data. Niural’s Agentic AI, EMMA, works across the entire platform enabling true end-to-end execution of workflows, research and analysis. And, for the first time, a company’s payroll funds can earn cash back. Funds earned are added into a customer’s Niural Wallet, for them to use wherever they’re needed most.

Founded in 2022, Niural AI is redefining what the modern financial infrastructure looks like, combining every employment model, AI agents and embedded financial capabilities that put more money back into businesses.

Niural AI Labs is the company’s dedicated research division, advancing the development of long-horizon AI agents designed to tackle the world’s most complex and consequential work.

Learn more at niural.com.

SOURCE Niural AI

Annual recognition reflects RLH’s longstanding commitment to partnering with founders to build enduring businesses. 

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 27, 2026 — RLH Equity Partners, a private equity firm with more than four decades of partnering with entrepreneurs to build high-growth, knowledge-led B2B enterprises, announced today that it has been named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors list for the sixth consecutive year.

The annual list highlights investment firms with track records of supporting entrepreneurs. To compile the list, Inc. gathers feedback from founders about their experiences partnering with investors and collects data on how their companies have grown and developed during those partnerships.

“Long before the term ‘Founder-Friendly’ emerged, RLH embraced an investment philosophy rooted in respect for what entrepreneurs have built and a conviction that achieving exceptional growth requires an outsized commitment to the people responsible for executing strategy,” said Mark Gartner, Managing Director at RLH. “Being recognized for the sixth consecutive year is an honor, and we are grateful for the trust our founder partners continue to place in us.”

RLH’s dedicated team of seasoned investors and operators works shoulder-to-shoulder with entrepreneurs to provide strategic guidance, operational support, and resources to help drive high-quality growth. The firm also offers dedicated, in-house expertise to help portfolio companies identify and execute on M&A opportunities.

The firm’s collaborative approach has fostered long-term relationships with dozens of founders, many of whom have gone on to become Strategic Advisors to RLH. These enduring relationships reflect the trust and shared commitment that underpin RLH’s partnership philosophy.

Learn more about why founders choose to partner with RLH and what they can expect on the journey at www.rlhequity.com.

About RLH Equity Partners

RLH Equity Partners invests behind passionate entrepreneurs in uniquely positioned, high-growth, knowledge-led B2B enterprises driven by macro changes in technology, healthcare, and regulatory environments. The RLH investment team strives to deliver strategic and operational guidance to its portfolio companies in navigating the opportunities and challenges of scale and rapid growth. RLH’s insights and processes to support entrepreneurs in building market-leading enterprises have been honed over RLH’s more than 40-year history of successful investing. RLH currently manages over $1 billion of assets and is actively seeking new portfolio company investments.

For more information, please contact:

Jessica Bramwell
Director of Communications
RLH Equity Partners
949-428-2205
[email protected]

SOURCE RLH Equity Partners

Investors bring derivatives, hardware, and power expertise to accelerate Luxor’s platform for AI and Bitcoin compute.

SEATTLE, Oct. 27, 2026 — Luxor Technology Corporation (“Luxor”), a full-stack compute company, today announced a $16 million strategic investment round led by CMT Digital, with participation from Canaan, MicroBT, Halo, Steelhead, and additional angel investors. The round includes both primary and secondary capital. Each investor is an operating partner that is part of the compute supply chain that Luxor serves: hardware, capital, and power.

The raise follows the September launch of Luxor AI, a business segment that extends the energy, hardware, software, compute trading, and data stack Luxor built for Bitcoin mining into the AI and high-performance computing market. Luxor brings that operating history with it: its hardware brokerage desk has traded $1 billion of ASIC hardware for Bitcoin mining, Luxor Energy services more than 75 MW of load across ERCOT and SPP, and its agentic cloud platform had reached 1.8 million workloads year to date as of September.

Luxor will use the investment to:

• Scale Luxor’s agentic cloud platform
• Provide working capital for the growing AI hardware business
• Scale Luxor’s compute derivative trading and market making
• Grow the team with key engineering and GTM hires

Global supply chains for GPUs and chips are becoming increasingly hard to navigate. Luxor’s AI hardware desk sources GPUs and AI servers through a tiered network of partners, and as a Value-Added Reseller to the major OEMs, has access to abandoned orders, special allocation, and used markets.

CMT Digital, the venture capital arm of Chicago-based CMT Group, draws on nearly three decades of electronic trading, market-structure expertise, and technology development, the same disciplines behind Luxor’s hashrate and AI compute derivatives businesses. As AI compute becomes a tradable market, operators and buyers need ways to price and manage risk on it. Luxor’s over-the-counter desk already offers cash-settled options, forwards, and backstops on compute-rental indexes, and CMT’s backing positions Luxor to scale that business.

“We believe Luxor deeply understands the energy and infrastructure landscape behind compute and the financial tools customers need to manage risk. The team has honed this skillset over the last eight years in the digital asset world, and is seeing it translate beautifully into AI,” said Sam Hallene, Partner at CMT Digital.

Nangeng Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of Canaan, commented, “As Canaan pursues long-term power resources in North America as part of its compute-plus-energy infrastructure strategy, we believe that joining Luxor’s cap table aligns with our goals. Luxor has become an important partner of Canaan across Bitcoin mining and the energy industry.”

“Compute markets are converging: the same miners, power sites and capital that served digital mining are now powering AI,” said Nick Hansen, CEO and Co-Founder of Luxor. “We chose investors who operate in those markets that strengthen each part of our platform. Our customers rely on us, and we build products that drive value for them.”

About Luxor Technology Corporation
From Bitcoin mining to AI, Luxor delivers the hardware, software, finance and energy tools that power the world’s compute. Its Bitcoin product suite spans Mining Pool, ASIC Firmware, Hardware Trading, Hashrate Derivatives, Energy Services, and Miner Management Software. Its AI product suite spans Hardware, Compute, Energy, Derivatives and Luxor AI: digital infrastructure for code and agents. Across both, Hashrate Index is Luxor’s data and research platform.

Media contact
Luxor Technology — [email protected] — www.luxor.tech

SOURCE Luxor Technology

Partnership will support the development of a full-service higher education enrollment partner

RADNOR, Pa., Oct. 27, 2026 — Virent Capital (“Virent”), a thesis-led private equity firm focused on building broader solutions in business services and products through a create-and-build strategy, today announced its first platform investment, Kanahoma, LLC (“Kanahoma”), a leading higher education marketing and enrollment services firm serving colleges and universities nationwide. Kanahoma’s management team will retain a meaningful ownership stake and continue to lead the business in partnership with Virent, helping institutions connect more students with programs that fit their goals.

As part of the partnership, Chip Paucek, Co-Founder and former CEO of 2U, has joined Kanahoma’s board as Co-Chairman. At 2U, Chip built one of higher education’s largest university-partnership platforms, scaling the company to nearly $1 billion in annual revenue, and he brings deep experience growing education businesses and the institutional relationships behind them. Seth Odell will continue to lead Kanahoma as CEO.

Kanahoma is Virent’s first create-and-build platform. Through this strategy, Virent partners with emerging, founder-led businesses earlier in their growth curve, backing founders who have already built something significant and helping them take it further. Virent adds services and capabilities through organic investment and complementary acquisitions to build broader solutions that improve customer outcomes and accelerate growth. Supported by Virent Drive, the firm’s in-house digital lab, Virent will help Seth Odell and the Kanahoma team grow the business from a leading higher education marketing agency into a full-service enrollment growth partner for colleges and universities.

Founded in 2020 by Seth Odell, a former higher education chief marketing officer, Kanahoma has grown to nearly 50 full-time employees and supports more than 20 institutions nationwide. Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies in both 2025 and 2026, Kanahoma’s team combines experience inside colleges and universities with expertise in performance marketing, creative production and digital strategy. Kanahoma works as an extension of its partners’ teams, with services spanning program strategy, brand positioning, paid media, web development, search engine optimization and prospective student engagement.

“Colleges and universities are facing sustained pressure on enrollment, and they increasingly need partners who understand both their mission and the practical work of reaching and enrolling the right students,” said Connor McMahan, Founder and Managing Partner of Virent Capital. “That shift is central to our thesis that enrollment growth has become a strategic priority for institutions, not just a marketing function, and that the market needs a partner able to support the full journey from first impression to enrollment. Kanahoma is exceptionally well-positioned to be that partner, and we’re excited to work with Seth and the team to build and add the capabilities that will make Kanahoma the leading full-service enrollment partner in higher education.”

“I’m incredibly proud of what our team has built and grateful to the institutions that have trusted us with work that matters,” said Seth Odell, Founder and CEO of Kanahoma. “The lines between marketing and enrollment are blurring, and our partners need more than a campaign or a channel. They need one team that understands higher education from the inside, connects every stage of the student journey, and gives them clear visibility into what’s actually driving enrollment. That’s what we’re building at Kanahoma, and with Virent’s resources, experience helping founder-led businesses scale, and technology-enabled approach, we can expand our capabilities and become a true full-service enrollment partner without losing the commitment to our team and institutions that got us here.”

“Kanahoma stood out in our research for its deep higher education expertise and the trust it has built with its partners,” said Bryan Hall, Vice President at Virent Capital. “We’re excited to work alongside Seth and the team to put new capabilities, data and technology behind that foundation.”

Salem Investment Partners provided the debt financing and co-invested in this transaction. 

Garnet Partners served as exclusive financial advisor and Lippes Mathias served as legal advisor to Kanahoma. Troutman Pepper Locke served as legal advisor to Virent Capital. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

About Kanahoma

Kanahoma is a San Diego-based higher education marketing and enrollment services firm founded in 2020 by Seth Odell. The company pairs experience inside higher education with expertise in strategy, performance marketing, creative, web and student engagement to help colleges and universities connect with the learners they are best positioned to serve. Kanahoma was recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies in 2025 and 2026. For more information, visit www.kanahoma.com.

About Virent Capital

Virent Capital is a thesis-driven private equity firm headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, focused on emerging, founder-led businesses in the lower middle market. The firm partners with founders earlier in their companies’ growth, investing in sectors where a create-and-build strategy can expand services and capabilities, improve outcomes for customers and accelerate growth. Virent combines sector research with a growth plan developed alongside each management team, and provides capital, operating support and acquisition expertise. Virent Drive™, the firm’s in-house digital lab, supports portfolio companies in data analytics, ecommerce, artificial intelligence, application development, performance marketing and automation. For more information, visit www.virentcap.com.

Media Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Virent Capital