Google DeepMind today pulled the curtain back on AlphaEvolve, an artificial-intelligence agent that can invent brand-new computer algorithms — then put them straight to work inside the company’s vast computing empire. AlphaEvolve pairs Google’s Gemini LLMs with an evolutionary approach that tests, refines, and improves algorithms automatically. The system has already been deployed across Google’s data centers, chip designs, and AI training systems — boosting efficiency and solving mathematical problems that have stumped researchers for decades. “AlphaEvolve is a Gemini-powered AI coding agent that is able to make new discoveries in computing and mathematics,” explained Matej Balog, a researcher at Google DeepMind. “It can discover algorithms of remarkable complexity — spanning hundreds of lines of code with sophisticated logical structures that go far beyond simple functions.” One algorithm it discovered has been powering Borg, Google’s massive cluster management system. This scheduling heuristic recovers an average of 0.7% of Google’s worldwide computing resources continuously — a staggering efficiency gain at Google’s scale. The discovery directly targets “stranded resources” — machines that have run out of one resource type (like memory) while still having others (like CPU) available. AlphaEvolve’s solution is especially valuable because it produces simple, human-readable code that engineers can easily interpret, debug, and deploy. Perhaps most impressively, AlphaEvolve improved the very systems that power itself. It optimized a matrix multiplication kernel used to train Gemini models, achieving a 23% speedup for that operation and cutting overall training time by 1%. For AI systems that train on massive computational grids, this efficiency gain translates to substantial energy and resource savings.
Boomi announced a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with AWS to help customers build, manage, monitor and govern Gen AI agents across enterprise operations. Additionally, the SCA will aim to help customers accelerate SAP migrations from on-premises to AWS. By integrating Amazon Bedrock with the Boomi Agent Control Tower, a centralized management solution for deploying, monitoring, and governing AI agents across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, customers can easily discover, build, and manage agents executing in their AWS accounts, while also maintaining visibility and control over agents running in other cloud provider or third-party environments. Through a single API, Amazon Bedrock provides a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI in mind, including support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), a new open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data and AI-powered tools. MCP enables agents to effectively interpret and work with ERP data while complying with data governance and security requirements. Steve Lucas, Chairman and CEO at Boomi. “By integrating Amazon Bedrock’s powerful generative AI capabilities with Boomi’s Agent Control Tower, we’re giving organizations unprecedented visibility and control across their entire AI ecosystem while simultaneously accelerating their critical SAP workload migrations to AWS. This partnership enables enterprises to confidently scale their AI initiatives with the security, compliance, and operational excellence their business demands.” Apart from Agent Control Tower, the collaboration will introduce several strategic joint initiatives, including: Enhanced Agent Designer; and New Native AWS Connectors and Boomi for SAP.
Capgemini has launched a new offering that enables organizations to unlock greater value from their legacy systems at unprecedented speed and accuracy. The new approach, powered by generative and agentic AI, allows organizations to gain cost savings, agility, and a significant improvement in data quality. It converts legacy mainframe applications into modern, agile, and cloud-friendly formats that can run more efficiently either on or outside of a mainframe. Capgemini’s automated mainframe application refactoring uses tools and techniques to automatically convert legacy mainframe applications, such as those written in COBOL, into modern architecture. The approach is supported by rigorous automated testing for faster, higher-quality transformations and reduced risk for businesses. Capgemini’s experience in delivering large and complex mainframe modernization programs, market leadership in AI, deep domain knowledge, and broad understanding of complex industry regulations has already delivered tangible results for blue-chip clients.
OpenAI is releasing its GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini AI models in ChatGPT. The GPT-4.1 models should help software engineers who are using ChatGPT to write or debug code, OpenAI spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo told TechCrunch. GPT-4.1 excels at coding and instruction following compared to GPT-4o, according to OpenAI, but is faster than its o-series of reasoning models. The company says it’s now rolling out GPT-4.1 to subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team. Meanwhile, OpenAI is releasing GPT-4.1 mini for free and paying users of ChatGPT. As a result of this update, OpenAI is removing GPT-4.0 mini from ChatGPT for all users. “GPT-4.1 doesn’t introduce new modalities or ways of interacting with the model, and doesn’t surpass o3 in intelligence,” said OpenAI’s Head of Safety Systems Johannes Heidecke in a post. “This means that the safety considerations here, while substantial, are different from frontier models.” Now, OpenAI is releasing more information about GPT-4.1 and all its AI models. OpenAI has committed to publish the results of its internal AI model safety evaluations more frequently as part of an effort to increase transparency. Those results will live in OpenAI’s new Safety Evaluations Hub, which it launched on Wednesday.
Mastercard has launched a stablecoin-focused partnership with cryptocurrency payments FinTech MoonPay. The collaboration will allow consumers and businesses to send and receive stablecoin payments across global markets. Companies and FinTechs will be able to employ Mastercard-branded cards linked to users’ stablecoin balances, allowing cardholders to spend their stablecoins, which will simultaneously be converted to fiat currency, at more than 150 million locations where Mastercard is accepted around the world. “By providing solutions that unlock stablecoin utility and ubiquity, we are redefining how money moves globally and driving a shift in payments as we know it,” Scott Abrahams, executive vice president, Global Partnerships at Mastercard, said. T he partnership will leverage the API-driven stablecoin infrastructure from Iron, acquired by MoonPay in March, to facilitate stablecoin transactions, turning “crypto wallets into new digital bank accounts for seamless global transactions.” This will let businesses, neobanks, and other payment participants manage payouts and disbursements more efficiently, improving cross-border money transfers, and help businesses offer stablecoin-based payouts to gig workers, contractors and creators.
BlockFills has deployed Definitive’s advanced on-chain execution platform to enhance its automated trade execution capabilities on behalf of institutional and venture capital (VC) clients and expand the variety of tokens BlockFills can trade on behalf of its clients. The partnership brings new benefits to clients of both firms. Patrick Zielbauer, Managing Director of Sales at BlockFills, said: “Definitive’s platform gives us an incredibly powerful tool to offer clients – including asset managers, hedge funds and VC firms – the ability to smoothly and efficiently enter or exit an altcoin position or token while protecting their anonymity and minimizing market impact. As a result of the partnership, we’re finding that even in the weeks since we deployed the platform, clients have brought more order flow to us, enabling them to take or exit from a significant position in even the most illiquid tokens, memecoins or other assets generally considered difficult to trade in nontrivial sizes.” Jai Prasad, Co-Founder of Definitive, said “Our platform uses sophisticated trade algorithms that aggregate liquidity across liquidity pools on multiple chains and optimize trades to leverage the deepest liquidity, minimize price impact and achieve superior execution for on-chain transactions. While our platform is enhancing BlockFills’ capabilities offered to its clients, our clients and prospects that require access to deep OTC liquidity in the spot, derivatives* and lending markets can turn to BlockFills to augment and enhance their on-chain trading activities.”
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) have published a joint research study that explored how central banks could continue to implement monetary policy operations in tokenised wholesale financial markets. Dubbed Project Pine, the study found that central banks could deploy policy implementation tools using programmable smart contracts in a potential future state where commercial banks have widely adopted tokenisation for wholesale payments and securities settlement. The project generated the prototype of a generic monetary policy implementation tokenised toolkit for potential further research and development by central banks across jurisdictions and currencies. The BIS and the Fed say the prototype can fulfil a common set of central bank implementation requirements, including paying interest on reserves, open market operations, and collateral management. The toolkit was tested against ten hypothetical scenarios that applied historical data inputs on past market events, such as interest rate tightening and easing cycles, quantitative easing and tightening cycles, and periods of strained market liquidity or broader market disruptions. “The prototype successfully responded and instantaneously carried out the intended operation under the varying market conditions,” states the BIS. “Project Pine’s findings highlighted areas for further research and analysis related to interoperability and data standardisation.”
VanEck is the latest asset manager to launch a tokenized treasury fund, the VanEck Treasury Fund (VBILL) with Securitize as its partner for tokenization, fund administration and transfer agency. Securitize is also BlackRock’s partner for its BUIDL money market fund. “By bringing U.S. Treasuries on-chain, we are providing investors with a secure, transparent, and liquid tool for cash management, further integrating digital assets into mainstream financial markets,” said Kyle DaCruz, Director of Digital Assets Product at VanEck. “Tokenized funds like VBILL are enhancing market liquidity and efficiency, underscoring our commitment to providing value to our investors.” The British Virgin Island fund targets institutional and qualified investors with minimum subscriptions starting at $100,000 for investments on Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Solana, and $1,000,000 on Ethereum. Most demand for tokenized money market funds comes from within the digital asset community, especially stablecoin issuers looking to use tokenized assets for their reserves. For example, just two stablecoin issuers (Sky and Ethena) account for $2.1 billion or 72% of BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.
JPMorgan Chase and quantum technology company Infleqtion have released an open-source software library to reduce the hardware requirements for practical quantum computing applications. The new qLDPC library introduces error-correction techniques that reduce the number of physical qubits needed to create reliable logical qubits by a factor of 10 to 100x. This development addresses one of quantum computing’s key challenges, the substantial hardware overhead in qubit numbers typically required for fault tolerance. “This library makes it possible to bring that number down by 100x – down to as few as 20 physical qubits per logical qubit,” Pranav Gokhale, general manager of computing at Infleqtion, told. Depending on the implementation, the new library reduces the requirement to between 15 and 150 qubits. The tools are specifically designed for Infleqtion’s neutral atom-based quantum computing hardware, which offers customizable qubit layouts, enabling more efficient error-correcting codes. The library has been released as open-source software, an uncommon approach for a financial institution partnership. For JPMorgan Chase, the development could enable new applications in financial optimization, risk analysis and fraud detection by making quantum computing more practical. The reduction in required physical qubits makes quantum approaches to complex financial problems more viable. The qLDPC library is now available for developers, researchers and hardware partners to explore methods for improving error correction and optimizing quantum workloads across various platforms. According to Gokhale, the open-source software approach, combined with finding talent in unexpected places, is helping bridge the workforce gap by making quantum computing more accessible.
Quantware announced a collaboration with Q-CTRL to deliver an autonomous calibration solution for its customers. By integrating Q-CTRL’s autonomous calibration solution, Boulder Opal Scale Up, with its cutting-edge QPUs, QuantWare’s customers will be able to achieve push-button tuneup of their on-premises quantum computers – an critical solution for scaling QPUs, especially those powered by QuantWare’s VIO technology, designed to unlock processors with over 1 million qubits. This new partnership will provide QuantWare’s customers with: Accelerated System Development: QuantWare’s customers will be able to drastically accelerate the construction and deployment of their quantum systems towards error correction. Q-CTRL’s autonomous calibration solution streamlines the setup process, reducing test times from days to hours. Maximized QPU Performance: Leveraging Q-CTRL’s Boulder Opal Scale Up solution empowers any user to achieve optimal performance from QuantWare QPUs with minimal effort. This ensures that customers can unlock the full potential of QuantWare’s QPUs, including the new Contralto-A Quantum Error Correction QPU recently launched in early access. Q-CTRL’s Boulder Opal Scale Up solution combines PhD-level human intelligence with AI-driven automation to overcome the quantum industry bottleneck. Built on the company’s track record of delivering peak QPU performance through physics-informed AI, Boulder Opal Scale Up provides an expert-configured and fully autonomous software solution to deliver fast, repeatable, and robust QPU characterization and calibration.
China’s Origin Quantum has launched its fourth-generation quantum control system, a move signaling the country’s increasing push to industrialize and scale quantum computing capabilities. The new system, dubbed Origin Tianji 4.0, supports over 500 qubits and serves as the central control for superconducting quantum computers, according to The Global Times, a media outlet under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The system, unveiled this week in Hefei, is positioned as a critical enabler for mass-producing quantum computers with more than 100 qubits. The control system is considered the “neural center” of a quantum computer. It generates, acquires and controls the precise signals that manage quantum chips, which are the computational heart of a quantum system. With the Tianji 4.0 upgrade, Origin Quantum claims major improvements in integration, automation and scalability compared to its previous version, which powered the country’s third-generation superconducting quantum computer, Origin Wukong. The company said Tianji 4.0 is integrated with four of Origin Quantum’s proprietary software platforms, enabling faster testing and adjustment of superconducting chips. These improvements are expected to reduce both the cost and time required to bring quantum machines online.
Origin Quantum Computing Technology has released its fourth-generation quantum control system, Tianji 4.0, which supports over 500 qubits and supports China’s continuing efforts toward building scalable, industrial-grade quantum computing infrastructure. Tianji 4.0 introduces improvements across scalability, integration, stability, and automation. It reflects a move from intense hardware tuning to standardized workflows capable of being executed by non-specialist engineers. Tianji 4.0 integrates with four core software systems developed by Origin Quantum. This full-stack integration streamlines the testing and tuning of superconducting qubit chips, which traditionally required input from PhD-level specialists. The result, according to the company, is a more repeatable and scalable approach to engineering, which prepares the system for use in future hundred-qubit quantum devices. Guo Guoping, director of the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center and chief scientist at Origin Quantum, emphasized that the launch signifies a transition from prototype-level development to replicable engineering production. This could lay the foundation for mass production of quantum systems that are both higher in qubit count and more reliable in operation, which are essential requirements for practical use in computation-heavy sectors. The functionality offered by Tianji 4.0 suggests a continued focus on hardware-software co-design, system stability under increasing qubit counts, and preparation for industrial deployment, as well as prioritization of higher-throughput and modular quantum platforms within China’s domestic quantum ecosystem.
Owners of the Apple Vision Pro will soon have the option of scrolling through apps using their eyes, without lifting a finger. Apple is working on a feature that builds upon the existing eye-tracking functionality of the Apple Vision Pro. Allegedly being tested for possible inclusion in visionOS 3, it will let users move around the app simply by looking around. The Apple Vision Pro already uses eye-tracking to determine what a user is looking at, with a pinching hand gesture used to select what is being focused upon. This seems like it would be a fairly reasonable progression of the functionality, and could be a boon for users who don’t necessarily wish to keep raising and lowering their hands to interact with an app. Apple will be making the functionality available across its own app collection. Developers will also be able to use the feature in their visionOS apps. The Apple Vision Pro is not the only device with eye-tracking functions. In June 2024, Apple introduced eye-tracking features to iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 as an accessibility feature, using the front-facing camera. In that iteration, Dwell Control automatically selects an item for a user once they have rested their gaze on a selectable element for a period of time. Smoothing and Snap-to-Item were also configurable to help with hands-free navigation.
From Netscape to Chrome, browsers are digital windows to the world. But that era is potentially poised to quickly circle the drain as AI comes to control a greater share of the flow of information. ChatGPT.com is now the fifth-most visited website in the world, with Google.com on top, followed by YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. The news that Perplexity is developing its own web browser, Comet, that is expected to include agentic AI capabilities and the ability to automate certain tasks, is already showing that how users find things, how they buy things and even how they know things, could increasingly be up for grabs. Instead of opening a browser window and typing a URL, users may soon speak or text a request into an agent that goes out, searches the internet and delivers what they need. No tabs, no clicking and no endless scrolling. That, at least, is the envisioned future. The whole concept of a web browser may be absorbed into an ecosystem of intelligent, personalized, persistent AI agents. The advent of the agentic AI web experience could mark a transformative period in how users access and interact with information online. At the heart of the potential evolution are large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. These systems are increasingly capable of understanding context, maintaining memory and executing multi-step tasks. But true agency requires more than linguistic prowess. Integration is key. APIs now serve as conduits through which AI agents interact with apps, services and devices. If AI agents are making purchasing decisions, traditional advertising strategies could falter. SEO, influencer marketing and even visual design may lose relevance if AI agents bypass websites in favor of direct API transactions. Brands will need to pivot, optimizing not for human attention but for AI interoperability. The AI browser wars have begun, and the outcome will shape the future of the digital landscape.
From Netscape to Chrome, browsers are digital windows to the world. But that era is potentially poised to quickly circle the drain as AI comes to control a greater share of the flow of information. ChatGPT.com is now the fifth-most visited website in the world, with Google.com on top, followed by YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. The news that Perplexity is developing its own web browser, Comet, that is expected to include agentic AI capabilities and the ability to automate certain tasks, is already showing that how users find things, how they buy things and even how they know things, could increasingly be up for grabs. Instead of opening a browser window and typing a URL, users may soon speak or text a request into an agent that goes out, searches the internet and delivers what they need. No tabs, no clicking and no endless scrolling. That, at least, is the envisioned future. The whole concept of a web browser may be absorbed into an ecosystem of intelligent, personalized, persistent AI agents. The advent of the agentic AI web experience could mark a transformative period in how users access and interact with information online. At the heart of the potential evolution are large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. These systems are increasingly capable of understanding context, maintaining memory and executing multi-step tasks. But true agency requires more than linguistic prowess. Integration is key. APIs now serve as conduits through which AI agents interact with apps, services and devices. If AI agents are making purchasing decisions, traditional advertising strategies could falter. SEO, influencer marketing and even visual design may lose relevance if AI agents bypass websites in favor of direct API transactions. Brands will need to pivot, optimizing not for human attention but for AI interoperability. The AI browser wars have begun, and the outcome will shape the future of the digital landscape.
Google is rolling out a redesign of the Search bar homescreen widget on Android that better emphasizes the optional shortcut. The previous design was a pill with the Google ‘G’ logo at the left. Next up is a custom shortcut, voice input microphone, and Google Lens shortcut. This new design takes after Circle to Search revamp earlier this year with an overarching pill-shaped container. It’s slightly taller than before, which aligns with Material 3’s preference for thicker search fields. At the left is a large Search bar that’s unchanged. What’s new is how Google moved the optional shortcut to a standalone circle at the right. This results in the custom button standing out much more, and is easier to tap. The available options are: None, AI Mode, Translate (text), Song Search, Weather, Translate (camera), Sports, Dictionary, Homework, Finance, Saved, and News. The minimum width to have everything appear is 4×1, instead of 3×1, which might disrupt some layouts. When you adjust the transparency slider, the outer container is what changes the most. We’re seeing this Search bar redesign with Google app 16.17 (latest beta). If you don’t have this change yet, highlight the widget on your homescreen and tap the pencil icon.
Arteria AI has partnered with TruStage Compliance Solutions, a provider of financial transaction technology and expertise, to launch Deal Flow, a content modification and deal management integration that is purpose-built to support community banks and credit unions. Clients can now gain access to Arteria’s proven, end-to-end digital documentation workflow for commercial lending. Deal Flow is accessed through existing dynamic documentation workflows and streamlines the modification and redlining of commercial loan documentation. Each change and decision to the deal is automatically logged and memorialized in a detailed audit trail for complete assurance on compliance and procedural consistency. Notably, TruStage’s compliance warranty is preserved for all unmodified parts of the document. The result is that negotiated transaction documentation moves into the digital sphere – communication is centralized on a digital platform, the right workflow steps are automated, and rich reporting insights become available to further streamline the deal process. Arteria removes the need for legacy manual processes by streamlining the documentation lifecycle, speeding up decision-making for all stakeholders through a highly-intuitive interface.
Almost half of U.S. adults who use buy now, pay later products have experienced at least one financial problem, according to results of a survey from the consumer financial services company Bankrate and the market research firm YouGov. Bankrate and YouGov surveyed 2,354 U.S. adults between March 19 and 21. Of those who participated, about 30% said they had used at least one buy now, pay later service. Of those who used BNPL services, 49% of those surveyed reported at least one financial issue: 24% said they outspent their budget, 16% noted missing a bill payment after making a BNPL purchase, 15% regretted a BNPL purchase and 14% said they had a problem with a refund or a return. Taking out multiple buy now, pay later services at a time is among the biggest warning signs, Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst for Bankrate said, because BNPL is used most frequently by financially vulnerable populations such as the working class and young people. “People find this a valuable payment method to spread out their cash flow. The problem is if you overdo it and you lose sight of how much you spent. That’s concerning because it shows how close to the edge people are,” he said.
Alternative lending fintech Pagaya Technologies has its sights set on expanding its personal loan offering to regional and super-regional banks while it also builds out its marketing acquisition engine. Pagaya currently partners with banks such as U.S. Bank and neobanks such as SoFi to offer artificial intelligence-powered second-look personal loans to consumers who might not otherwise qualify. Pagaya integrates with lenders’ loan origination systems and buys the loans it originates from the lenders and sells those loans on the secondary market. It is also active in auto lending and point-of-sale buy now/pay later lending. All in, Pagaya counts 31 lenders as partners. Pagaya is in talks with four or five regional banks to help build out or expand their personal-loan offerings, co-founder and CEO Gal Krubiner told. “There is a new era where people are starting to look at growth, and for the regional banks, personal loan is a good way to grow the franchise and to give solutions and products to their customers,” he said. Many regional banks look to personal loans to help secure deposit inflows, a trend that Pagaya is hoping to capitalize on when bringing new partner banks into the fold, Krubiner said. “From our perspective … working with Pagaya could generate for a mid-sized bank over $1.5 billion of personal-loan origination in less than nine months,” Krubiner said, citing U.S. Bank’s performance on the platform. Pagaya is also using its integration into lenders’ underwriting platforms to offer pre-screened loans to potential customers in another avenue that it hopes will lead to growth, said Sanjiv Das, president of Pagaya. “Think about our total market opportunity. We have 31 lending partners. Those 31 lending partners have about 60 million consumers as existing customers. We’ve only scratched the surface right now with the 3% [penetration],” Das, told. Pagaya is also working to help lenders “bid better” for leads from data aggregators, such as Credit Karma or Experian, Das said. The push toward regional banks comes on the heels of solid first-quarter earnings results that beat analysts’ estimates across nearly every metric. Revenue jumped 18% year over year to $290 million, ahead of analysts’ expected $285 million. Net income landed at $8 million, or 10 cents per share, compared with a $21 million loss in the same reporting period last year and eclipsing analysts’ estimate of a $10 million, or 15 cent per diluted share, loss. Shares of Pagaya have risen about 26% since the company reported earnings on May 7, according to a research note from David Scharf at Citizens. Scharf attributes the gains to Pagaya hitting positive GAAP net income ahead of schedule. KBW analyst Sanjay Sakhrani bumped his price target for Pagaya’s stock following the earnings report, pointing to pre-screen and affiliate channels as “growth drivers.” “We believe PGY is well-positioned to shift toward revenue growth across its three loan markets — personal, auto, and POS and deliver profitability. While macroeconomic volatility may introduce risks to funding costs and underwriting capabilities, management’s disciplined risk approach and measured appetite provide confidence,” Sakhrani said.
SavvyMoney announced its acquisition of CreditSnap, a fintech solution provider that powers intelligent integrations to digital loan, deposit and account onboarding solutions for banks and credit unions. With CreditSnap’s technology, we aim to strengthen our ability to work alongside existing LOS and account opening systems, delivering even greater value to our partners and their consumers. JB Orecchia, president and CEO of SavvyMoney said, By combining SavvyMoney’s ability to drive high-intent demand with CreditSnap’s flexible integration solution, we’re delivering a comprehensive digital experience for both lending and deposit growth—one that works with, not against, their existing systems. Financial institutions can now offer a seamless, end-to-end experience by leveraging SavvyMoney’s demand-generation capabilities in conjunction with CreditSnap’s flexible integration process. From personalized credit insights to frictionless application and booking, allowing every integration to work with one unified platform. CreditSnap Key Benefits: The platform integrates with more than 73 loan origination, core and digital banking systems; Loan application time can be reduced from 12 minutes to as little as 2 minutes; Financial institutions have reported a 20–40% increase in loan volume and deposit funding rates as high as 78%
Savings and investing startup Acorns has acquired EarlyBird, an investment gifting platform for families. As part of the acquisition, EarlyBird will shut down, and all customer accounts will officially close on June 23. Customers’ funds will be returned to the bank account connected to their account. EarlyBird’s app allowed families and friends to gift investments to children while preserving memories through a digital time capsule. The investments would become the child’s once they turned 18, and they could use funds for things like paying for college, paying a down payment on a home, or seeding their first business. Acorns Early offers a debit card designed for kids and teens to help them develop financial literacy and manage their money. The company launched Acorns Early following its acquisition of GoHenry, a startup focused on providing money management and financial education services to 6- to 18-year-olds. Existing EarlyBird customers will be offered a free one-year subscription to “Acorns Gold,” a plan that offers access to all Acorns products, including Acorns Early. Customers will receive an email detailing the sign-up process. EarlyBird users will not be able to transfer their EarlyBird funds over to Acorns Early. If users want to continue their investing journey with Acorns, they need to withdraw their funds from EarlyBird and open a new account with Acorns. The company plans to integrate EarlyBird’s digital time capsule feature into the Acorns Early app at a later date. On EarlyBird, the feature allowed users to build out time capsules by recording videos at memorable moments in their lives.
Allvue Systems launched Allvue Agentic AI Platform, the first agentic AI platform purpose-built for the alternatives market. Designed to transform how investment professionals interact with technology, the Allvue Agentic AI Platform blends intelligent workflow automation with relevant context to deliver faster, smarter, and more intuitive decision-making across the investment lifecycle to help firms scale and deliver optimized returns to GPs. Allvue’s Agentic AI Platform is developed with the highest standards of enterprise security, data privacy, and model governance. Key protections include: Data Privacy & Isolation, Model Isolation; and Secure API & Access Controls. Allvue is also launching Andi, Allvue’s AI assistant, a browser-based knowledge agent that provides on-demand product guidance and navigation support across Allvue’s Credit Front Office suite. Initially focused on system navigation and product documentation, the Andi AI assistant will evolve to support more advanced use cases—such as querying portfolio data, interpreting compliance rules, surfacing trade and research insights, and creating investment tear sheets. Embedded directly into product headers and browser environments, the Andi AI assistant enables users to query product documentation, navigate complex workflows, and surface critical insights using natural language in a contextual, secure and seamless experience. Core Andi AI capabilities include: Seamless Installation, Flexible Interface, Context-Aware Intelligence, Guided Discovery, Continuous Learning, Data Querying (Upcoming).
Arete Wealth, a leading broker-dealer and registered investment advisory firm, has partnered with Orion, a leading provider of wealthtech solutions for financial advisors and enterprise firms. The strategic collaboration aims to enhance advisory services and streamline operations for Arete Wealth’s Corporate RIA and affiliated Independent RIAs. Orion’s platform integrates portfolio management, reporting, trading, compliance, and client engagement tools, enabling financial professionals to drive efficiencies, improve client experiences, and scale their businesses effectively. Arete Wealth’s new partnership with Orion is a significant step in its strategy to provide advisors with the most innovative tools available, ensuring they can optimize their practices and better serve their clients. The partnership comes at a time of substantial growth for Arete Wealth, which has nearly doubled its Advisory Assets Under Management (AUM) since 2022. Orion’s platform will play a crucial role in supporting this trajectory, delivering seamless integration, advanced analytics, and superior client engagement capabilities to Arete’s growing network of financial professionals.
Artificial intelligence-powered offerings in wealth management regularly hammer home one benefit they provide in particular: saved time. “Advisors are saving 10-plus hours per week on average by leveraging AI to streamline their client meeting process,” said Startup Zeplyn CEO Era Jain. “That’s about 500-plus hours per year or 20 new clients they can service per year.” These time savings are primarily spent on business development and relationship building. Solo advisor Kelly Klingaman, founder of Kelly Klingaman Financial Planning, said she wanted to utilize an AI notetaker in her business so she could be more present during client meetings. Having tried out a few AI notetaking tools so far, Klingaman said Fathom is “affordable, easy to use and dynamic” — and it saves her between five and eight hours per week. For Gregory Furer, the founder and CEO of Beratung Advisors, one of the biggest game changers has been the integration of Holistiplan tax planning software. “With AI, we can now analyze a client’s tax return and generate insights in just three minutes — a process that used to take an hour and was prone to human error,” he said. From there, Furer said they create tax modeling for clients in 20 to 30 minutes, compared to the two to three hours it used to take. He said his firm is also leveraging AI within eMoney, its financial planning software, “to instantly calculate the amount of life insurance needed to maintain client-defined success rates and goals.” “This real-time decision support enhances the accuracy and speed of our recommendations,” he said. Like Klingaman, Furer has been utilizing AI for meeting notes; he uses Jump. “As the tool continues to learn our systems and language, it could eventually save five to 10 hours per week of high-value planner time, potentially becoming our most cost-effective AI tool.” Rob Schultz, senior partner and wealth manager at NWF Advisory said he also uses Jump for meeting summarization. “The quality of the notes was significantly better than I ever wrote down during a meeting and it allows me to focus solely on the client in front of me. It saves me time in the post-meeting review, probably 30 minutes per client interaction.” Samuel Flaten, co-founder of Narrow Road Financial Planning said he mainly uses ChatGPT, which he calls a “total game-changer.” In addition to the writing assistance, Flaten said he has also trained a custom GPT with “everything I know as a CFP” to workshop ideas, stress-test strategies and pull in creative alternatives he might not have considered. Across his average weekly schedule of 20 meetings, Schultz said his use of Jump AI frees up about 10 hours. Jain of Zeplyn recommends that firms optimize their scheduling by identifying advisors who successfully use AI to save time, establishing their best practices and training or coaching other advisors.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is developing a mobile application called the Augmented Reality Home Assessment Tool (ARHAT) that uses AR and smartphone features like LiDAR scanners to help people assess their homes and identify potential accessibility issues as they age. The app “takes users through a step-by-step process that measures relevant parts of a living space and offers suggestions to make it more accessible. While using it, a user is prompted to select one of 14 limitations they may have — including visual impairment, mobility challenges or balance issues — and “then select the areas of the home to evaluate. Follow-up questions and prompts for measurements are tailored to the user’s answers, with the option to add notes and take photos. The app then employs a LiDAR scanner to measure a home’s elements and to visualize recommended changes or renovations. By superimposing visuals in the space as seen through the device’s camera, the tool will instantly let you know if something in the home is an accessibility barrier. The assessment then creates a detailed report listing identified barriers and potential issues with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance, and makes recommendations on how to best address them. The researchers believe ARHAT can be a faster and more accurate alternative to traditional manual home assessments, potentially saving time and costs for healthcare agencies and systems.
Spatial computing pioneer Mawari announced its latest initiative — i.e. Decentralized Infrastructure Offering (DIO) — to help meet the rapidly growing demand for AI-powered immersive content globally. The company has invited compute resource owners worldwide to become ‘Guardian Node Operators’ within its ecosystem, thereby contributing directly to a decentralized infrastructure supporting next-generation digital experiences. Mawari’s infrastructure has been designed specially to power complex 3D experiences — including lifelike 3D Avatar AI agents — which are then streamed efficiently to devices worldwide. In an apparent departure from typical crypto-based node offerings, the Mawari team has emphasized that DIO has been built on the principles of genuine utility, fairness, and long-term sustainability, with the earnings of its Guardian Node Operators being directly tied to actual network revenue and usage. In this regard, the firm’s reward structure has been made to primarily centre around its ‘network monitoring rewards’ module, which represents 20% of Mawari’s total network revenue. Not only that, ‘early operator incentives’ have also been crafted, providing token allocations for node licenses maintained with high reliability and uptime during the initial growth phase. Lastly, features like flat pricing across all node license tiers, options for third-party node management alongside other long-term opportunities are meant to ensure that the ecosystem is able to deliver seamless utility even as the XR market continues to expand.
Storycraft — the AI-powered game platform, where players can build their own characters and interact with them in their own digital worlds — has raised a $3 million seed round to accelerate its launch of Storycraft’s multiplayer mobile game built on Google Cloud. With Storycraft, founder Andy Mauro wants to create the Minecraft of storytelling—a place where anyone with a story to tell, not just game designers, can turn their ideas into rich, playable experiences by working collaboratively with AI. Storycraft combines: 1) AI Worldbuilding Tools: Players use generative AI to create characters, items, structures, gifts, and even sky and lighting effects to give each world a unique feel. 2) Social Gameplay: Real and AI friends can explore and contribute to each other’s worlds and storylines. AI characters ask human players to make things for them, and players visit each other’s worlds to collect the necessary resources creating a near infinite well of ongoing inspiration. 3) UGC-Driven Economy: Players earn, trade, and showcase user-generated content across a shared multiverse. Storycraft is the first game where literally everything is created by players. 4) Emotional Storytelling: Every world is a stage for different narratives. The AI acts as a Muse for the player to help them come up with ideas, but also responds to the details they provide, upping the creative ante like a true creative partner.
Sphere Entertainment, operator of The Sphere in Las Vegas, teamed up with Google and Warner Bros. Studios to recreate “The Wizard of Oz” into an immersive 3D experience unlike anything anyone has ever seen, thanks to the use of entirely new AI techniques that enhance its resolution and generate additional scenery to fit a gigantic, wraparound LED display. The producers leveraged some of Google’s most advanced AI models to completely reimagine the classic movie, in a collaboration that marks the beginning of a much broader push into entertainment by the technology giant. The original flick was shot using a three-strip Technicolor 35-millimeter motion picture camera, which was state-of-the-art at the time but couldn’t be more outdated. Getting that to fit on Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot curved, 16K resolution display proved to be a monumental challenge, but Google’s AI was apparently more than up to the task. Google decided that only its most advanced large language models, such as Gemini, Veo 2 and Imagen 3, were up to the task of rendering “The Wizard of Oz” in all of its immersive, 3D glory, but they alone are not enough. In addition, they had to devise new techniques such as “performance generation” and “outpainting” to increase the film’s resolution and extend scenes to include imagery and characters that didn’t exist on the original flick. That was necessary to make the movie fit with the Sphere’s novel screen, which totally surrounds the viewer to make them appear as if they’re right in the middle of the movie. In the Sphere’s version, viewers will be able to turn around and see characters along with the rest of the house that was not pictured in the original scene.
Albertsons is rolling out the TreviPay Pay by Invoice solution to enable business buyers, including small offices, K-12 schools, local government and community organizations and residential programs, to receive a dedicated line of credit for online grocery purchases with 30-day net terms. The Albertsons pay by invoice program includes a self-serve portal to assign spending limits to approved purchasers and real-time tracking of invoices, payments and credit lines. TreviPay’s invoicing program offers the control to customize purchasing hierarchies and the convenience of paying using credit lines, which we know are important to this buyer segment. Through the partnership, stores across Albertsons Cos. banners can automate their acounts receivable processes for business purchases with real-time credit decisioning, electronic invoice generation and payment tracking, with the goals of reducing billing errors and eliminating back-office resources. TreviPay settles funds right away and owns any buyer credit risk. Enabling Albertsons Cos.’ business customers to pay by invoice allows their corporate buyers to make large, repeat orders using their preferred payment method, while retailers eliminate the complexities of accounts receivables and fuel growth.
Billie, the new standard for B2B payments and a leading provider of payment solutions for business customers, is expanding its availability on Stripe. After launching just last summer, Billie is now the first B2B Pay Later provider to reach general availability status on Stripe’s financial infrastructure. With this, any online shop or marketplace in more than ten countries can now offer Billie to their business customers easily. With Billie, business customers can make purchases and defer a payment for up to 30 days. At the same time, merchants receive payment upfront, making Billie’s payment method a beneficial tool for cash flow management of both merchants and business buyers. Billie makes this possible with real-time approval of buyers at checkout while providing default and fraud risk protection for merchants. Through partnering with Billie, Stripe expands its own offering and enables merchants to offer more payment options and flexibility to business buyers while reducing their credit risk and the administrative burden of collection and dunning processes to zero. Next to Pay Later, Billie is offering additional payment solutions and features including Installments, Trade Accounts, Consolidated Statements, and Recurring Payments. Billie’s solution is seamlessly integrated with Stripe’s platform, making the activation process a matter of minutes and requiring any merchant just to follow a few steps.
Lithic announced the expansion of its platform to enable fintechs to issue cards on the American Express® network. Fintechs of all sizes now have the opportunity to apply to develop and scale innovative payments solutions for consumers and businesses with access to the American Express network. “By empowering fintechs to issue cards on the American Express network, our customers now have a differentiated product choice that can deliver exceptional value to their users,” said Bo Jiang, CEO of Lithic. Lithic will unlock a new network option for fintechs looking to launch card products, with the global acceptance and trusted reliability of the American Express network, paired with Lithic’s modern and scalable card issuing platform. “The partnership helps fintechs and other industry disruptors launch payment products and capabilities quickly and easily on the Amex network, while providing access to our differentiated brand, assets and expertise,” said Will Stredwick, SVP and GM of Global Network Services for North America at American Express.
Cleo announced a strategic partnership with Paystand, a B2B payments solution provider that works largely with retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and software vendors. Paystand can help retailers, manufacturers, distributors and software vendors automate their order-to-cash and accounts receivable (AR) processes, letting them collect revenue faster. Todd Kibisu, Channel Account Manager at Paystand. “Cleo’s platform automates the creation of sales orders and invoices in our customers’ ERP systems, and Paystand seamlessly takes over at this point by automating AR processes through the reconciliation of funds. Together, we’re enabling businesses to save time, reduce costs, and unlock new growth opportunities.” Through this collaboration, Paystand also delivers ecosystem integration to customers, offering: Streamlined Operations: Eliminate manual data entry for AR tasks and integrate directly with ERP, eCommerce, and accounting systems. Enhanced Visibility: Comprehensive views of payment transactions, improving tracking, reducing fees, and mitigating risks. Improved Customer Experience: Integration with CRM systems enables better customer support, communication, and overall management.
