AI & Finance™ | News for the Week Ending 7/3/26

Airwallex, a leading global payments and financial platform for modern businesses, today announced it has raised $320 million in Series H funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $11 billion, up from its $8 billion valuation in December 2025. 

The round was led by returning investor Addition, with participation from Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures. 

The investment will help Airwallex accelerate product development across autonomous finance and agentic commerce, expand its infrastructure and regulatory footprint into new markets, and continue scaling the teams building its next generation AI native financial software. 

Akemona today announced the launch of CapMark™ AI Agent, an AI-powered product that helps investment banks, asset managers, broker-dealers, and businesses create and organize digital asset offerings for raising funds and issuing tokenized products such as fractionalized stocks, tokenized funds, and options. CapMark AI Agent is available as part of Akemona’s AI Investment Banker for Digital Assets platform, which Akemona provides to financial institutions and businesses as a white-label subscription service. 

The launch of CapMark AI Agent arrives amid significant regulatory and market momentum. The SEC is currently advancing a landmark shift for tokenization by exploring an Innovation Exemption—including the proposed repeal of core Regulation NMS rules—to permit third parties to tokenize U.S. stocks without issuer approval, paving the way for 24/7 global trading on blockchain rails. This regulatory tailwind aligns with massive existing demand. According to CoinMarketCap data, the market capitalization for tokenized stocks already exceeds $6.4 billion. 

CapMark AI Agent automates the offering creation process, including issuer due diligence, offering structure analysis, regulatory document preparation, bookbuilding, and workflow coordination. CapMark is the AI automation engine of the Akemona platform, which includes Akemona’s Tokenization Cloud, Issuer Hub, Investor Portal, Admin Console, Escrow Manager, and OnchainTA digital transfer agent. It enables businesses and financial institutions to create, launch, manage, and service digital asset offerings through one integrated system. 

Associated Banc-Corp (NYSE: ASB) (“Associated” or “Company”) today announced Andy Miner has joined the organization as senior director, AI for Corporate & Commercial Banking, reporting to Phillip Trier, executive vice president, head of Corporate & Commercial Banking. This new role will be the single point of accountability for AI within the line of business, driving strategy, uses cases, delivery and adoption and being a steward of risk and data. 

Associated’s Commercial business has been steadily growing, with 2025 being a record year. In 2026, the team expanded into Dallas as part of the bank’s organic growth strategy. Focusing on AI benefits for Commercial will help accelerate loan processing, generate personalized client insights and can help with heavy lifting of data so the team can focus on offering solutions and products for clients. For Commercial, AI will primarily be first used in internal workflows such as portfolio management and treasury and payments, where customer experience can be improved through careful automation of mundane tasks. 

Miner joins Associated from U.S. Bank, where he served in a senior role to launch and scale the bank’s enterprise analytics function while overseeing more than 60 team members. He built and scaled enterprise analytics and AI capabilities that drove customer growth, improved banker effectiveness, and contributed to meaningful revenue expansion. Prior to that, Miner was at Target where he led a 100+ person global team in the company’s newly formed data organization, leading business intelligence and analytics supporting numerous departments. 

Boards want AI scale. Auditors want accountability. Finance teams need both. Yet only 36% of CFOs feel confident in their ability to deliver real enterprise impact from AI initiatives, according to Gartner research.   

Today, Basware, the global leader in Invoice Lifecycle Management (ILM), announced the Governed Autonomy Framework for Finance: a new operating model that lets organizations expand AI authority within customer-defined controls, policies, and audit trails, so that autonomy, accountability, and financial integrity advance together.   

Inside finance, AI is moving from assistance to execution, reviewing invoices, resolving exceptions, and increasingly, acting on behalf of the team. In a survey of global finance leaders, 92% of CFOs said they are already integrating AI into financial decision-making, either across some processes or virtually all of them.   

Clara Capital, a leading provider of working capital solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, today announced the successful completion and testing of Clara Connect, its fully automated marketplace platform designed to modernize how organizations connect business owners with access to capital. 

Clara Connect creates a seamless digital ecosystem that automates the entire funding workflow—from application intake and document collection to underwriting, approval, funding, commission management, customer engagement, and ongoing portfolio visibility. The platform enables strategic partners to offer capital solutions directly to the businesses they serve while providing a streamlined and transparent experience for all participants. 

The launch of Clara Connect follows a period of significant growth for Clara Capital. Most recently, the company surpassed $400 million in total funding delivered to small businesses nationwide and continued its rise among America’s fastest-growing private companies, reflecting increasing demand for both its capital solutions and technology-driven operating model. 

Dataro, a fundraising intelligence platform, today launched its integration with Bloomerang, the intelligent Giving Platform trusted by more than 24,000 nonprofits. First announced at GiveCon 2026 as part of a strategic partnership between the two companies, the integration is now generally available to Bloomerang customers on select plans. 

The integration brings three capabilities inside Bloomerang: predictive scores on every donor record that show who needs attention, daily recommended actions that guide the next best step, and on-demand AI prospect research that compiles a donor’s giving history, affinity signals and recommended next steps — all directly inside the Bloomerang Giving Platform. 

The integration brings turnkey predictive fundraising to teams of every size, with no separate login, contract or manual data export required. 

Equifax® (NYSE: EFX) has secured 39 new patents in the first half of 2026, broadening its global intellectual property (IP) portfolio of more than 750 issued or pending patents across the globe. Continued portfolio expansion is part of the organization’s forward-looking IP strategy, designed to maximize the value of Equifax proprietary data for customers and consumers, accelerate and differentiate EFX.AI product innovation, and deepen leadership in explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI). Year-to-date, Equifax has secured 14 new patents that directly support the company’s approach to AI, further complementing its EFX.AI™ strategy for product innovation.  

Explainable AI helps customers responsibly analyze massive amounts of data to make more informed decisions. Equifax led the way toward an industry standard for explainable AI, introducing the first machine learning credit scoring system with the ability to generate logical and actional reason codes for consumers more than a decade ago. Since that time, the company has more than 180 pending or approved patents for explainable AI techniques. In the first half of this year, Equifax secured a Canadian patent grant on its original methodology for optimizing neural networks for risk assessment, expanding this invention into 11 patents globally, including in the U.S., Australia, and India. 

Optimizing Neural Networks for Risk Assessment (Canada) – This patented system solves the problem of the AI “black box” by forcing credit-scoring neural networks to maintain a strict, one-directional relationship between inputs and outputs (e.g., as payment history improves, a credit score should increase). By ensuring this clear mathematical relationship, the system delivers transparent, fully explainable credit decisions and regulatory reason codes without sacrificing the predictive power of advanced AI. This allows financial institutions to leverage the power of advanced AI while still being able to generate “adverse action codes” or “reason codes” that clearly explain to a consumer why they received a specific score and what actions impact their credit. This functionality is being used today in solutions such as Insights Score for Personal Loans and Insights Score for Auto. 

FactSet, a leading global data and AI solutions provider to the financial markets, today announced a multi-faceted strategic partnership with Google Cloud to create a new generation of AI-powered solutions for the financial industry. The collaboration addresses a growing demand from financial firms for workflow-specific agentic solutions that are powered by trusted data and fully sourced, auditable, and defensible in regulated environments. The partnership supports FactSet’s broader AI vision by delivering agentic experiences across the investment and deal-making lifecycles. 

FactSet AI enhanced with Gemini models: FactSet is embedding Google’s enterprise Search and Gemini model capabilities in its Workstation via Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to launch the next generation of agents for finance. The partnership will accelerate the development of new Workstation products with deep research functionality and multi-modal experiences, leveraging Google Cloud’s broad range of AI capabilities. Direct integration with Google grounding will supplement FactSet’s financial data and improve both the breadth and depth of FactSet’s AI-enhanced insights. 

Deeper financial intelligence in Gemini Enterprise: Building on the previously announced collaboration with Google DeepMind, FactSet’s MCP and agent sharing functionality will deepen the financial intelligence in Gemini Enterprise – Google Cloud’s AI platform for building, governing, and deploying agents. Through this integration, financial professionals will benefit from seamless interoperability between the FactSet Workstation and Gemini Enterprise. 

Feathery, the AI operating system for wealth management, today announced that firms using its advisor transitions platform transitioned more than $2 billion in assets under management (AUM) during the first quarter of 2026 alone, underscoring growing demand for modern infrastructure that helps wealth management firms execute advisor transitions faster and with greater operational confidence. 

The milestone comes as advisor transitions become increasingly complex. Firms must manage data spread across custodians, CRMs, spreadsheets, documents and legacy systems while simultaneously preparing accounts, onboarding clients and generating revenue as quickly as possible. 

Feathery’s advisor transitions platform helps RIAs and broker-dealers ingest and validate transition data, connect custodians and CRMs and bulk repaper client accounts. The goal is simple: help firms become transition-ready before day one so accounts can be ready to send as soon as advisors join. 

Float Financial announced today a CAD $85 million all-equity Series C round led by Inovia Capital, raising the company’s valuation by 70%. The round saw continued participation from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, which led Float’s Series B in December 2024, and Garage Capital, along with new investment from BDC Capital and Northleaf. 

With this Series C, Float has raised CAD $300M since inception, including debt and equity financing, and existing investors remained fully invested. Float’s suite of finance products for Canadian businesses is trusted by leading companies including Cohere, Knix, Neo, Jane, Rebel, and more. 

The new capital will fund three priorities: advancing Float Intelligence, the AI layer that automates the workflows finance teams run every day; expanding coast to coast, including Western Canada and Quebec; and hiring across product, R&D, sales, and marketing. Float’s mission is to ignite the full potential of Canadian businesses, giving them the financial power, clarity, and control they deserve. The company applies the same discipline to its own operations: by using AI to stay lean, its 170-person team has grown revenue per employee 50%, adding headcount even as layoffs continue across much of the technology sector. Float Intelligence extends that advantage to customers, embedding AI directly into the finance workflows they run every day. 

Fractal Analytics Ltd. (BSE: 544700) (NSE: FRACTAL), a globally recognized enterprise AI company serving Fortune 500® organizations, has announced the appointment of Leandro DalleMule as Chief Practice Officer (CPO), Financial Services & Insurance (FSI). He will be responsible for the FSI practice globally, driving strategy, client success, industry innovation and AI-led transformation for financial institutions and insurers. Leandro will also play a key role in expanding Fractal’s capabilities, strengthening strategic partnerships, and helping clients unlock tangible business value through AI. 

Fractal’s FSI practice drives AI-powered transformation across areas such as customer experience, risk and fraud, credit and underwriting, claims, pricing, and compliance, delivering significant business impact at scale. Fractal hosts several purpose-built FSI solutions on their agentic AI platform, Cogentiq, including Cogentiq Underwriting, which drives faster approvals, reduces risk exposures and boosts underwriter productivity through AI-driven, explainable risk assessment, and Cogentiq Sales Assist for Financial Services, which enables relationship managers to grow AUM and close opportunities faster with intelligent insights. 

Leandro is a seasoned AI, data, and analytics leader and brings with him more than 30 years of experience helping organizations drive business outcomes through data, analytics, and AI. Before joining Fractal, he was a Managing Director in Deloitte’s FSI AI & Data practice. Prior to his tenure at Deloitte, he spent more than 20 years in senior executive roles at AIG, Citibank, BlackRock, and Planck, where he built and led a leading AI platform for insurance through its acquisition by Applied Systems in 2024. 

Future Proof, the wealth management industry’s largest community and event platform, today announced the launch of Future Proof Research, a new data and intelligence arm dedicated to tracking the forces reshaping the business of financial advice. Its first initiative: The State of AI in Wealth Management, which will be co-commissioned with Impruve, selected on the merit of their pioneering role in the emerging category of AI Stewardship for wealth management, opens for responses today, and will become a semi-annual benchmark for how wealth firms and the professionals inside them adopt, govern, deploy, and profit from artificial intelligence. 

AI is moving through wealth management faster than any technology shift before it, yet most firms are navigating it without a clear picture of where they stand against their peers. Future Proof Research was built to close that gap with rigorous, repeatable data rather than headlines and hype. The inaugural findings will debut live on the main stage at the 2026 Future Proof Festival, September 14–17 in Huntington Beach, California, with a new edition released alongside each flagship Future Proof event going forward. 

The research is designed around two lenses at once. The Firm Lens measures where firms are on their AI journey: strategy, spend, governance, and outcomes, and powers a proprietary AI Maturity Index. The Individual Lens measures how professionals in every role and function are adopting AI and who is driving the change, powering a companion AI Champion Index. Together they let a leader open the report and answer two questions at once: “Where do firms like mine stand?” and “Where do people in my role stand?” 

Genpact (NYSE: G), an agentic and advanced technology solutions company recognized for its deep industry knowledge, process intelligence, and last-mile expertise, today announced the launch of the Genpact Deductions Recovery solution to automate deduction management and improve cash flow. Part of Genpact’s growing agentic solutions portfolio, the new AI-powered accounts receivable solution is designed to help consumer goods companies recover millions in lost revenue by automating the identification, validation, and resolution of disputed deductions. 

Solving the consumer goods sector’s leakage problem with intelligent automation
In the world of retail and consumer goods, organizations often miss up to 20% of preventable deductions, or avoidable financial penalties from promotions, logistics, and compliance. At the same time, more than 30% of invalid claims are left unresolved. Legacy systems and fragmented manual workflows that rely on disconnected spreadsheets, emails, and portals cannot keep pace with customer complexities, leading to significant revenue leakage. 

Built on Microsoft Azure for enterprise-grade scalability, the Genpact Deductions Recovery solution uses a network of specialized AI agents that orchestrate the end-to-end deduction lifecycle. 

Hippo Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HIPO), a technology-native insurance group, today announced the engineering-wide deployment of Devin, Cognition’s AI software engineer, to drive faster software development across the insurance lifecycle. From rate filings and underwriting to distribution and customer experience, Hippo’s adoption of Devin enables its engineering team to move faster on the work that matters most — supporting faster, more reliable software delivery across distribution, risk management and customer experience. 

Devin is designed to take on multi-step development tasks — planning, writing, and testing code across complex systems — working alongside Hippo’s engineers. For Hippo’s engineers, that capability translates directly to one of insurance’s most persistent challenges: rapidly building software that works correctly across fifty states, each with its own regulatory requirements. 

In an industry where speed and precision both matter, Devin gives Hippo’s engineers the ability to build, test, and iterate quickly without multiplying manual effort, focusing their effort on higher-value engineering work. Hippo’s engineering team is now accelerating delivery across the full range of its operations — from Hannah, its AI-powered service representative, to program data ingestion for partner MGAs, to key distribution initiatives. 

Intact Insurance is pleased to announce the appointment of Rory Meleniclis as Chief Information Officer. In this role, he will lead the next phase of the company’s technology evolution across its global specialty lines business, with a focus on strengthening core systems, advancing cloud capabilities and enabling faster, more data-driven decision-making across the business. 

Meleniclis joins Intact Insurance with more than 20 years of experience leading large-scale technology teams within highly regulated financial institutions. Most recently, he held senior leadership roles at Royal Bank of Canada, where he led global, multi-disciplinary teams responsible for core platforms across payments, data and cybersecurity, supporting large-scale operations and transformation initiatives across North America and international markets. 

Over the course of his career, he has led cloud modernization, platform renewal and enterprise initiatives, with a strong focus on using artificial intelligence, machine learning and data to improve performance, enhance customer experience and strengthen risk management, while maintaining a balance between operational resilience and forward-looking innovation. 

Jump, the leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for advisors and financial services professionals, today announced a series of new product innovations designed to save advisor time, improve the client experience and help firms grow. 

Jump continues to expand automation across every stage of the client lifecycle – from prospect engagement and onboarding to meeting preparation, follow-up and ongoing relationship management. The latest innovations further reduce administrative work, eliminate friction between systems and help advisors spend more time serving clients and growing their businesses. 

End-to-End Client Onboarding: Advisors can now initiate account opening workflows directly within Jump, with AI-assisted field mapping automatically pre-filling required information using client data already available across connected systems. Advisors review and approve information before submission, reducing manual entry and context switching. This new capability adds to Jump’s customizable client intake forms and document ingestion capabilities, allowing Jump to power end-to-end client onboarding. 

Lemonade, Inc. (NYSE: LMND), the digital insurance company powered by AI and social impact, today announced the renewal of its reinsurance program, effective July 1, 2026. 

Lemonade renegotiated the program to retain more of the economics from its growing business, while expanding protection against catastrophes and major weather events. 

Under the renewed quota share agreements, Lemonade expects to cede approximately 18% of premium to reinsurers, down from approximately 20% previously. Lemonade will retain a larger share of the business’s growing gross profit. 

nVision Global, a leading provider of freight audit and payment, transportation management, claims, and freight intelligence solutions, today announced the introduction of nSure AI, an advanced AI & Data Intelligence Engine purpose built to create Trusted Transportation Financial Intelligence from fragmented transportation information. 

Unlike traditional OCR technologies or document capture solutions, nSure AI is designed to understand, validate, verify, enrich, and automate transportation data across the entire transportation financial lifecycle. The engine combines Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Transportation Business Rules, Validation Logic, Supporting Document Compliance, Data Enrichment, and Intelligent Automation to transform disconnected transportation information into trusted, actionable financial intelligence. 

Freight audit and payment is a critical financial control process used by companies to validate transportation invoices, confirm billed charges against contracted rates and business rules, identify discrepancies, manage exceptions, and support accurate payment to transportation providers. For organizations managing high volumes of shipments across multiple modes, regions, currencies, and transportation providers, the quality, accuracy, and completeness of transportation data directly impacts invoice accuracy, payment timing, compliance, reporting, and transportation spend management. 

Options Technology today announced the release of AtlasInsight V5, the latest version of its market-leading network visibility and analytics platform, delivering significant advancements in performance, usability, and troubleshooting capabilities. 

AtlasInsight V5 represents a step change in functionality & performance, introducing a range of new features designed to provide clients with faster insights, deeper visibility, and simplified operations across their environments. 

At the core of this release is the integration of Capture 200, the new high performance capture system capable of 200 Gb/s packet capture, enabling organizations to monitor and analyze high-volume network traffic at scale with precision and reliability. This enhancement ensures AtlasInsight continues to meet the demands of increasingly complex and data-intensive trading infrastructures. 

Orion today announced it has achieved ISO/IEC 42001 certification, the first international standard for artificial intelligence management systems. The certification, awarded following an independent third-party audit, validates the AI Management System that governs the Denali AI intelligence layer embedded across Orion’s workflows. The achievement places Orion among the first in wealthtech — and the first known portfolio accounting provider — to meet the standard. For the forward-thinking, growth-oriented firms Orion serves, it is independent confirmation that every AI capability Orion delivers is governed, responsible, and built to earn their trust.  

ISO 42001 sets requirements for how organizations establish, maintain, and continually improve the way they govern AI across its lifecycle, including risk assessment, transparency, data governance, oversight of third-party AI providers, and human oversight. 

The certification comes as advisor demand for trustworthy AI accelerates. In Orion’s 2026 Advisor Wealthtech Survey, advisors named AI and automation the number one force multiplier for firm growth, while only one in ten reported using advanced AI capabilities and nearly a quarter had no AI tools in place. 

Parabellum Investments (“Parabellum”), a leading investment firm specializing in enterprise software and fintech, today announced its acquisition of Crux Informatics, Inc. (“Crux”), the industry-leading platform for AI-powered external data management.  

In today’s global economy, data is the lifeblood of financial decision-making, yet the sheer volume and complexity of that data often create significant bottlenecks for institutions. Crux is solving this challenge by acting as the critical connective tissue between raw, fragmented data sources and the advanced models that power the world’s leading financial and technology firms. 

The acquisition marks a major milestone for both organizations. Combining Crux’s platforms with Parabellum’s operational expertise and long-term growth strategy, the partnership will accelerate product innovation, broaden international reach, and deliver even greater efficiency to Crux’s customer base.  

Ryan, a leading global tax services and software provider, has named Jonathon Travis (JT) as President, Global Technology, focused on unifying the Firm’s technology, software, and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives to accelerate innovation and drive business outcomes across the organization. 

In his new role, JT will lead Ryan’s global technology strategy and execution, overseeing efforts to modernize how the Firm builds, deploys, and scales technology solutions. He will work across the organization to ensure technology and AI capabilities directly support business objectives, enhance client service delivery, and empower team members with innovative tools and resources. 

As President of Global Technology, JT will lead a unified approach, designed to foster alignment across software development, infrastructure, data, and AI initiatives. His focus will include advancing solutions tailored to the unique needs of Ryan’s practice areas and clients while driving faster, more effective delivery of technology across the Firm. 

Scienaptic AI, a global leader in AI powered credit decisioning technology, today announced that Michigan First Credit Union has selected its AI platform to modernize its lending operations, enhance decisioning speed, and responsibly expand access to credit for its growing membership. 

Founded in 1926 by nine educators gathered around a dining room table, the institution began as Detroit Teachers Credit Union with a simple mission to provide financial stability to its peers. As the credit union expanded its reach and services, it evolved into Michigan First Credit Union to reflect a broader commitment to the entire state. Today, managing over $1.5 billion in assets and serving more than 165,000 members, the institution remains deeply rooted in its educational legacy and community-focused values. Guided by the philosophy of being there for life’s important “firsts,” Michigan First provides highly personalized financial products, expert guidance, and robust community support to residents and businesses across Michigan. 

Speridian Technologies, a global consulting and technology services firm, today announced the launch of its FinOps for AI offering, a structured engagement model that helps organizations convert AI spending into measurable business efficiency, stronger margins and faster growth. The practice helps organizations answer “how do we control AI spend?”  with a sharp focus on Token Cost Optimization (TCO): the discipline of tying every token consumed to the value it creates. 

Across every sector, the mandate is the same: do more with less. AI has quickly become the most powerful tool to reach efficiency. But unlike flipping on a utility, AI is not unlimited or free. As organizations move beyond experimentation into full-scale production, the cost of running AI at scale is variable, often invisible and can grow exponentially as use cases multiply. 

Token consumption is highly variable, frequently invisible to finance teams, and can grow exponentially as AI spreads across the enterprise. Speridian’s framework targets four major cost drivers most enterprises overlook: input vs. output tokens, the modality premium, the model tier tax, and context window creep. 

TaxRock and FactorEvo today announced a partnership that gives factors continuous, real-time intelligence on a client’s IRS standing. Now integrated into FactorEvo, the AI-native operating system for specialty finance, TaxRock signals the moment a client’s IRS status changes, turning a one-time check at funding into ongoing visibility for the life of the relationship. 

The partnership reflects a broader shift in how factoring manages risk. For years, credit decisions have relied on documents, credit reports, and periodic checks. As fraud and financial distress move faster, that approach leaves gaps where exposure can build unseen. A growing view in the industry, captured in FactorEvo founder Robert Vasquez’s book Signals: The Doctrine of Transportation Factoring, holds that the firms that thrive will be the ones that verify truth faster than everyone else, using data and intelligent systems to surface meaningful signals across the funding lifecycle. 

IRS exposure is one of those signals, and one of the hardest to see in time. It is often a small part of a credit decision, yet it can undo an otherwise sound deal on its own. Because a federal tax lien can take priority over a factor’s claim on the receivables it has funded, a single change in a client’s tax status can put a portfolio at risk. TaxRock’s AI surfaces this activity as a continuous signal, closing a gap that periodic checks leave open. 

Unimarket, a global leader bringing clarity, control, and impact to Source-to-Pay solutions, today announced the launch of AI Invoice Automation — a standalone AI-powered product purpose-built to eliminate the inefficiencies of manual invoice processing. Designed for AP and finance teams, AI Invoice Automation brings intelligent document processing into Unimarket’s product suite, addressing one of the most persistent challenges in finance operations: the time, cost, and error risk that come with processing invoices by hand. 

Unimarket’s AI Invoice Automation, transforms how finance and accounting teams manage their invoice operations. The solution automatically captures, classifies, and validates invoice data from arrival through to payment, reducing processing costs by up to 85%, and achieving 95%+ data capture accuracy. Validated data is then routed through automated approval workflows and delivered seamlessly into downstream procurement and ERP systems, giving organizations real-time visibility over payables and cash flow with significantly less manual effort. 

Unimarket’s AI Invoice Automation covers the full invoice lifecycle, from receipt to payment, helping organizations of all sizes reclaim time lost to manual data entry, exception handling, and approval chasing. The result is faster cycle times, improved accuracy, and greater financial visibility and control. 

UnionHub® today introduced UnionHub IQ™, an intelligence layer now embedded across its Peak™ Platform. The benefits industry has grown too complex for static software alone, with hundreds of plans, intricate rules, and dense policy language standing between people and the decisions they need to make. UnionHub built IQ to close that gap, offering real-time guidance that helps people understand their benefits and use them with confidence. 

UnionHub IQ™ uses artificial intelligence as part of its engine, but its purpose is not automation for its own sake. It is human intelligence, amplified. IQ helps members learn in real time how their benefits work, guiding them as they navigate the platform, select benefits and benefit amounts, and make sense of policy language and provisions. It offers guidance tailored to a member’s situation, so people can make clearer, more confident decisions when they need to. Throughout, IQ supports people rather than replacing them: it explains, guides, and surfaces what matters, while the member remains the decision maker. UnionHub IQ™ is designed to support understanding, not to replace licensed advice, plan documents, carrier rules, or administrative review. 

That same support extends to the people who administer benefits. A single administrator may manage hundreds of plans, each with its own rules. Everyday questions, such as the timing of a deduction, why a payment failed to process, or what a policy provision means, can take real time to answer. UnionHub IQ™ surfaces this information through clear visual cues inside the platform, helping administrators see what is happening across a group, locate billing and payment details, and understand dense policy language quickly. The result is less time per task and shorter service calls, because the right information, specific to the person being served, is already in front of them. For carriers, brokers, and TPAs, IQ brings the same clarity at scale, with the visibility to spot billing and deduction issues and understand plan specifics faster. Across all of these roles, IQ supports the work rather than performing it: administrators and partners stay in control and make the final call. 

Upstart 

Upstart Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: UPST), the leading artificial intelligence (AI) lending marketplace, today announced its renewal of its forward-flow agreement with Neuberger Specialty Finance, the dedicated asset-based investment team within Neuberger, a global investment management firm. As part of the renewal, funds managed by Neuberger Specialty Finance are expected to invest in up to $600M of consumer loans originated through the Upstart platform. 

Valence AI, an emotional intelligence infrastructure company, today announced $5 million in total funding, including a seed round led by Differential Ventures, with participation from Difference Partners, Willowtree Ventures, Change Paradox Ventures, and SRI International. The announcement coincides with the issuance of two U.S. patents on the company’s proprietary audio signal processing pipeline, among the only patents ever issued on identifying emotional state from live speech in real-time conversation using deep learning. 

The company builds the emotional intelligence infrastructure for voice AI. Its Pulse Emotion model analyzes live calls and classifies emotional state from speech in real time, turning tone, pacing, and other vocal cues into structured data that voice agent builders, contact center platforms, and sales and support teams can act on alongside transcripts and intent. The company was founded by Chloe Duckworth and Shannon Brownlee, who launched Valence AI after a hackathon project focused on helping neurodivergent people better understand emotional cues in conversation. 

Valence AI develops and publishes its own foundation models, trained on proprietary speech datasets built to reflect a wide range of demographic and neurotype diversity, and reports 92 percent accuracy on internal benchmarks. Products include emotion-aware IVR, an Agent Assist copilot for live call coaching, emotionally intelligent AI voice agents, and post-call quality assurance. Integrations with ElevenLabs and Cartesia enable realistic, expressive audio informed by its emotional analysis of the speaker. In production deployments, the company reports handle time reductions of 30 percent, alongside gains in customer satisfaction scores, close rates, and time to close. 

Webull (NASDAQ), an online investment platform, hosted its mid-year investor event in New York City yesterday, where it unveiled Vega Portfolio, the next evolution of Vega, Webull’s AI-powered decision partner. The company also showcased its expanding institutional business and previewed a pipeline of new investing and trading capabilities that underscore Webull’s evolution into a comprehensive investing ecosystem. 

Vega Portfolio builds on Webull’s existing suite of artificial intelligence-powered investing tools, helping investors research securities, analyze portfolios, understand market events and receive personalized, AI-driven guidance to make more informed investment decisions. The new capability reflects Webull’s broader vision of embedding artificial intelligence throughout the investing experience while keeping investors in control of their financial decisions. 

In addition to Vega Portfolio, Webull highlighted the expansion of Webull Institutional, which provides technology infrastructure and trading solutions for financial institutions, developers, and enterprise partners. The company also previewed several new and forthcoming platform enhancements, including managed bond portfolios, expanded access to private markets through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), automated trading strategies, enhanced options capabilities, and continued international product expansion. 

Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting, today announced the next advancement of CCH Axcess™ Expert AI, the platform’s intelligent layer that is reshaping how tax work gets done. With the general availability of new AI-powered document intelligence in CCH Axcess™ Scan, firms can now automate one of the profession’s most complex and time-intensive workflows: the ingestion and interpretation of source documents, including highly variable K-1s and supporting statements. 

The release marks another step in Wolters Kluwer’s strategy to deliver low-touch tax preparation, where Expert AI is embedded directly into the work professionals do every day, freeing them to focus on judgment, advisory, and client service. 

CCH Axcess Expert AI brings generative and agentic AI capabilities together across the CCH Axcess platform, grounded in Wolters Kluwer’s authoritative tax content and decades of professional expertise. Scan is the newest capability to join this expanding set, alongside ongoing advancements in workflow, tax preparation, and advisory. 

Niobrara Capital (“Niobrara”), a U.S. based private equity firm focused on investing in middle-market B2B technology and technology-enabled services companies, today announced a strategic partnership with WovenLight, a firm purpose-built to transform performance in private equity portfolio companies through data science and artificial intelligence. 

The partnership reflects Niobrara’s strategy of tech-enabled investment in technology companies and its belief that AI will be a defining competitive edge in strategic and operational value creation. This outlook is informed by Managing Partner Chip Schorr’s nearly three decades of technology investing and Niobrara’s longstanding focus on backing the first- and second-derivative beneficiaries of the megatrends in the evolving technology landscape. 

The partnership is already active across Niobrara’s portfolio and investment pipeline, with initial projects underway and more planned.