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Klarna announces Rep Her initiative addressing gender-based disparities in women’s sports merchandise accessibility

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In partnership with Sports Innovation Lab, key findings from a groundbreaking, data-led report identify a $4 billion untapped U.S. women’s sports merchandise market for retailers, with 79% of women’s sports fans indicating they would buy more merchandise if more options were available to them; To further address the cause, Klarna and women-owned media and commerce company TOGETHXR have released limited edition merchandise with proceeds benefiting the Women’s Sports Foundation

NEW YORK, June 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Klarna, the AI-powered global payments network and shopping assistant, today announced, Rep Her, a multifaceted, research-backed initiative to raise awareness around gender-based gaps in women’s sports merchandise availability. In partnership with fan intelligence company Sports Innovation Lab, Klarna has released a first-of-its-kind report titled Rep Her: Revealing the Unmet Demand for Women’s Sports Merchandise. The Rep Her report values the rapidly growing women’s sports merchandise market at an estimated $4 billion annually, proving the sector’s drastically unmet consumer demand, and measures gender-based imbalances between men’s and women’s sports fan communities. To further address consumer appetite, Klarna has teamed up with female Olympian-founded, trailblazing media and commerce company TOGETHXR and 2x World Cup Champion, NWSL Champion, ESPN Analyst and TOGETHXR consultant Ali Krieger to launch limited edition merchandise and has also launched a new innovative shopping experience within its app and website.

Key findings from Klarna and Sports Innovation Lab’s report include that fans are:

Hungry for Options: 79% of surveyed respondents reported they would purchase more women’s sports merchandise if there were more options available to them, while 28% reported they could not find a style they likedDemanding Inventory: More than 60% of fans who searched for and intended to buy women’s sports merchandise did not make a purchase because it was not in stockSeeking Out Retailers: 32% of women’s sports fans cannot find a retailer that carries merchandise related to their favorite teams and athletesSearching for More Styles: Buyers of women’s sports merchandise are 60% more likely to have trouble finding a style than buyers of men’s sports merchandiseExpressing Fandom Through Merch: 67% of women’s sports fans have purchased sports merchandise despite only 49% having ever purchased a ticket to a live sporting eventLimited Compared to Men’s Sports: For every nine pieces of men’s sports merchandise available, women’s sports has one (The 30-team NBA has 9x more merchandise options than the 12-team WNBA, and the 29-team MLS has 6x more merchandise options than the 14-team NWSL)Vast Supporters: Most women’s sports fans identify as fans of multiple sports and leagues – top leagues include the WNBA (60%), NWSL (51%), NCAA Women’s Basketball (49%), NCAA Women’s Volleyball (39%) and the USWNT (37%)

“Consumer appetite for league, team, and athlete merchandise is vastly exceeding supply,” said Angela Ruggiero, Co-Founder of Sports Innovation Lab. “There is a golden opportunity for retailers to capitalize on a surging market that is telling us if you create something authentic to the community, they will buy it.” 

Klarna, TOGETHXR and Krieger have tapped designers Sophia Chang and Mellany Sanchez to create t-shirts and tote bags featuring the phrase “A movement, not a moment,” celebrating their passion for women’s sports and allowing fans to Rep Her with pride. This merchandise not only symbolizes the growing influence of women’s sports, but also empowers fans to showcase their dedication. Available for purchase on both Klarna.com and TOGETHXR.com, a percentage of all proceeds from the collection will go to Billie Jean King’s Women’s Sports Foundation, emphasizing that the interest in women’s sports is a formidable force that’s here to stay.

Additionally, to help women’s sports fans find merchandise to represent their favorite teams with ease, Klarna has curated an innovative women’s sports destination on Klarna.com and in its app, offering a seamless way to discover, shop and purchase women’s sports merchandise utilizing its interest-free pay in 4 payment option.

“As a brand that breaks the status quo and is a big supporter of women’s sports through our three-year partnership with Angel City Football Club, we saw there was a lack of merchandise available for women’s sports fans yet demand for it so we want to do our part to find a solve and contribute to fueling women’s sports fandom to continue to help propel the industry forward,” said Klarna’s Head of B2C Marketing in North America and the United Kingdom, Megan Gokey. “We are energized by the growing attention surrounding women’s sports and are proud to launch this initiative with Sports Innovation Lab and TOGETHXR to raise awareness around the merchandise gap, ultimately helping to make merchandise more accessible to millions of fans and create a space for women’s sports fans to shop smarter and ‘fan’ harder.”

“As a female athlete myself, it’s incredibly important to see efforts like these that highlight and address gender disparities in sports, like the gap in women’s sports merchandise. This initiative is a pivotal step in recognizing the value of women’s sports and ensuring that fans have the merchandise they want,” shared TOGETHXR consultant Ali Krieger. “Klarna has pushed the boundaries when it comes to creating a smart way to shop and pay, and this initiative directly speaks to the brand’s impactful efforts to push the women’s sports movement forward.”

This report is the fourth annual installment in Sports Innovation Lab’s internationally acclaimed The Fan Project series, which has become the global sports industry’s north star guidance on the commercialization of women’s sports since launching in 2021.

To view the full Rep Her report, please visit HERE. Additionally, Sports Innovation Lab is hosting a live webinar on July 11 to provide a report read-through and data deep dive, which can be accessed by registering HERE.

About Klarna

Since 2005 Klarna has been on a mission to accelerate commerce with consumer needs at the heart of it. With over 150 million global active users and 2 million transactions per day, Klarna’s fair, sustainable and AI-powered payment and shopping solutions are revolutionizing the way people shop and pay online and in-store, empowering consumers to shop smarter with greater confidence and convenience. More than 500,000 global retailers integrate Klarna’s innovative technology and marketing solutions to drive growth and loyalty, including H&M, Saks, Sephora, Macy’s, Ikea, Expedia Group, Nike and Airbnb. For more information, visit Klarna.com.

About TOGETHXR

TOGETHXR is a media and commerce company founded by Jessica Robertson alongside four of the world’s top professional athletes, Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel, and Sue Bird. With a focus on rich storytelling rooted in lifestyle and youth culture, TOGETHXR is an unapologetic platform where representation and gender equality are both expected and required. TOGETHXR highlights a diverse and inclusive community of game-changers, culture shapers, thought-leaders, and barrier breakers – finding and telling the stories of women who are doing the same. As one of the most compelling platforms for women in sport and culture, TOGETHXR’s in-house production studio has created a slate of scripted and unscripted premium content, including Surf Girls: Kaikaina, More Than A Name, FENOM, Summer of Gold, and more, which are in discussions to be adapted for film, TV, and digital media. In 2023, TOGETHXR was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies and won Media Company of the Year in the DigiDay Media Awards.

About Sports Innovation Lab

Sports Innovation Lab is a data company that enables brands and sports properties to build more effective sponsorships, improve targeted advertising, and enhance fan experiences. Known for its pioneering research on fan behavior and the commercialization of the women’s sports market, Sports Innovation Lab’s flagship Sports Data Cloud offering built on proprietary observational, transactional, and deterministic fan data is evolving how organizations use data to understand their customers and acquire more of them – starting with sports & entertainment. Learn how global brands including the NFL, Nike, NHL, Ally Financial, WNBA, and NASCAR use Sports Innovation Lab’s data, audiences, and strategic advisory to drive revenue by visiting sportsilab.com or following on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.

Media contacts:
Klarna – Kimberly Gibbs
kimberly.gibbs@klarna.com
(614) 967-5032

Sports Innovation Lab – Anthony Baldini
anthony@athletestrategies.com
(408) 506-5975

TOGETHXR – Togethxr@laruepr.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

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SOURCE Klarna Bank AB (publ)

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CollectivIQ Introduces GigaBrain, Giving Enterprises a Shared Brain That Gets Smarter as Employees Work

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New Enterprise Intelligence Layer Turns the Collective Learnings of AI Agents Into Secure, Usable Organizational Knowledge

BOSTON, Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CollectivIQ, the collective intelligence platform built to give employees more honest AI insights and digital teammates that put its intelligence to work, today announced the availability of GigaBrain, a new shared intelligence layer that enables organizations to capture, connect, and use the knowledge accumulated by employees and their Digital Direct Reports (DDRs), which are specialized AI teammates that work for people much like human direct reports do. Every company has valuable knowledge that lives outside its formal systems, across various tools, residing in employees’ heads, embedded in conversations, and lodged in disparate company applications. GigaBrain is designed to make that collective intelligence available to the organization and its employees.

As employees work with their Digital Direct Reports, those AI teammates develop context about their work, including projects, processes, responsibilities, relationships, and preferences. With GigaBrain, those individual learnings can contribute to a shared enterprise memory, allowing knowledge developed in one part of an organization to make AI more useful across the business. The result is an enterprise AI environment that gets smarter through use. Rather than requiring employees to repeatedly find, upload or explain the same information, GigaBrain gives employees and their Digital Direct Reports access to relevant organizational context when they need it.

When a sales representative’s DDR learns the intricacies of a customer’s procurement process, including approval requirements, key decision-makers, and purchasing timelines, that knowledge can automatically become available to other team members, subject to appropriate access permissions. When the customer reaches out for help, the team will already have the context needed to navigate the relationship effectively, without asking the customer to repeat information or relying on a manual handoff.

“Companies are collectively spending billions to bring intelligence to their employees, but very little of that investment makes the company itself smarter,” said John Davie, CEO of CollectivIQ. “The breakthrough isn’t just giving every employee an AI teammate, it’s making sure what those employees and AI teammates learn becomes an advantage for the entire organization. GigaBrain turns everyday work into intelligence that compounds across the enterprise.”

While enterprise AI platforms such as Microsoft Copilot and Glean help employees access organizational information, GigaBrain is designed to capture knowledge that emerges through employees’ day-to-day interactions with their DDRs, including insights that may never be formally documented. GigaBrain creates an organizational knowledge layer that can connect what employees and their Digital Direct Reports learn through everyday work, giving AI access to relevant internal context alongside the broader knowledge available from large language models.

GigaBrain was built to provide a source of enterprise knowledge that Digital Direct Reports can draw upon as they work, including the ability to trace information back to its source, giving employees greater visibility into where organizational knowledge came from, and helping AI work from relevant company context. Employees do not need to manually document every useful insight for the system to become more valuable. As they collaborate with their Digital Direct Reports, relevant knowledge can become part of the enterprise intelligence available to other authorized AI teammates.

GigaBrain is also designed for the realities of enterprise information governance, as employees can use an incognito mode when working with information that should not contribute to shared organizational memory, giving users a way to keep sensitive or confidential interactions out of GigaBrain.

GigaBrain expands CollectivIQ’s vision for Digital Direct Reports beyond individual AI productivity, allowing the knowledge developed through that work to become part of a broader organizational intelligence layer. Together, they give companies a foundation for AI that does more than answer questions. CollectivIQ’s ecosystem can learn how an organization works, retain what it learns and make that knowledge useful across the enterprise.

GigaBrain is available through the CollectivIQ platform. For more information, visit www.collectiviq.ai.

About CollectivIQ

CollectivIQ is the collective intelligence platform built to give employees more accurate AI insights and teammates that put its intelligence to work. Founded by the leadership team behind Buyers Edge Platform, CollectivIQ was built to bring accountability, action, and economic alignment to enterprise AI adoption. Learn more at www.collectiviq.ai.

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SOURCE CollectivIQ

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Pactum Launches Intake Agent, Cutting Purchase Request Cycle Time by 90%

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New AI agent replaces complicated purchase forms and repeated follow-ups by completing and checking every request before it is submitted, inside Microsoft Teams, Coupa, and SAP Ariba.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Pactum, the most advanced agentic AI platform for enterprise autonomous procurement execution, today announced the launch of its Intake Agent, which lets employees describe what they need to buy in plain language. The agent turns each request into a complete, correctly coded requisition and checks it against company buying policies before it is submitted.  Available now in Microsoft Teams, Coupa, and SAP Ariba, the Intake Agent connects with Pactum’s other agents to enable end-to-end autonomous indirect procurement. A purchase can draw on an existing contract or move to autonomous sourcing and negotiation, with a human buyer handling requests that require judgment.

The launch extends Pactum’s growing portfolio of AI agents to the start of indirect procurement, covering purchases such as software, office equipment, and professional services. It brings Pactum’s co-founders’ vision of procurement run with AI agents from the first request through sourcing and negotiation into operation. Procurement teams set the buying rules once, and the agent applies them to every request, whatever its value.

“Procurement teams can now run indirect procurement with full autonomy while remaining in control and managing the exceptions,” said Kaspar Korjus, Co-Founder and CEO of Pactum. “Our Intake Agent helps resolve questions earlier so requests can move forward with less back-and-forth and teams can focus on the decisions that need their expertise.”

For employees, finding an approved supplier or selecting the right accounting code can require expertise across procurement, finance, operations, and IT teams. Missing or incorrect information can lead to rejected requisitions and repeated follow-ups, leaving buyers to focus on correcting forms instead of focusing on supplier relationships and commercial decisions. Review queues can stretch from days to weeks.

With Pactum Intake, employees describe what the business needs, whether goods or services of any complexity, and can provide supporting documents such as a supplier quote. The agent uses the request and relevant documents to identify the best procurement category and complete the accounting and supplier details. It asks only the follow-up questions needed to complete the requisition. Once the request is checked, it is handed off to another Pactum digital worker to autonomously source and negotiate for better pricing and terms where required.

“Building software that assists procurement professionals is relatively easy. Building software that runs the whole process on its own, from the first request to the final purchase, is much harder,” said Kristjan Korjus, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Pactum. “It is the difference between driver assistance and a car with no one behind the wheel. Most procurement AI still needs a buyer at the wheel for every request. Our AI agents take the request all the way to the purchase on their own, and it is remarkable to watch them pass the work from one agent to the next.”

The launch follows Pactum’s Requisition Alignment Agent surpassing one million requisition checks, which validates purchase requests against company buying policies, existing contracts, and approved suppliers. Intake builds on this foundation in policy enforcement by connecting employee requests with agents that carry out sourcing and negotiation.

For more information about Pactum Intake, visit https://pactum.com/procurement-agents/intake.     

About Pactum:

Since 2019, Pactum has been leading the shift to autonomous procurement. Its AI agents check every purchase request against a company’s policies, contracts and approved suppliers, source and negotiate with suppliers in more than 40 languages, and work inside Coupa and SAP Ariba. Pactum agents are relied on by more than 60 of the world’s largest enterprises. To learn more, visit www.pactum.com.

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SOURCE Pactum

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Crush Security Launches Crush Dollar Exposure, Turning Cyber Risk Into Dollars and Showing Which Security Investments Reduce It Most

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New financial risk intelligence capability uses FAIR-informed modeling, Monte Carlo analysis and security data to help CISOs and CFOs quantify cyber exposure, prioritize remediation and communicate financial risk to executive leadership.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Crush Security today announced the launch of Crush Dollar Exposure, a new capability within its cybersecurity intelligence platform that translates cyber risk into financial exposure and helps organizations identify which security improvements can deliver the greatest reduction in potential financial loss.

For years, cybersecurity teams have measured their environments through vulnerabilities, risk scores, compliance percentages and control gaps. While valuable to security operations, those measurements often fail to answer the fundamental questions that executives and boards need answered:

How much could our cybersecurity weaknesses cost the business, and where should we invest to reduce that exposure?

Crush Dollar Exposure is designed to answer those questions by connecting an organization’s security posture, control coverage, threat intelligence and industry financial loss data to a quantitative view of cyber risk. The result is a financial perspective that enables security and business leaders to evaluate potential losses, compare remediation priorities and make more informed investment decisions.

From Technical Risk Scores to Financial Decisions

Traditional cybersecurity assessments often produce long lists of findings ranked by technical severity. But the most technically severe vulnerability is not necessarily the one that represents the greatest potential financial loss to the organization.

Crush Dollar Exposure changes the decision-making process by evaluating security gaps through their estimated contribution to financial risk. The capability provides four principal measurements:

Annualized Financial Exposure: An estimate of potential annual cyber losses, expressed in dollars.Financial Exposure Relative to Revenue: A view of modeled cyber exposure in relation to the organization’s annual revenue, providing business context.Value-at-Risk Analysis: Potential loss thresholds at selected probability levels, supported by loss-exceedance curves that illustrate the range of possible financial outcomes.Financially Prioritized Remediation: Security control gaps ranked by their modeled contribution to financial exposure, helping teams identify where remediation may reduce the most risk.

Rather than simply reporting that a security control is missing or a vulnerability is critical, Crush Dollar Exposure helps organizations understand the potential financial consequences and prioritize corrective action accordingly.

Connecting Every Security Gap to Business Impact

One of the capability’s key differentiators is its ability to connect security control weaknesses to modeled loss scenarios and financial consequences.

For example, a security team evaluating investments in identity protection, endpoint security and vulnerability remediation can use the model to determine which weaknesses contribute most significantly to estimated financial exposure. This allows security leaders to move beyond asking which problem is technically most severe and begin asking which investment is likely to provide the greatest financial risk reduction.

The analysis also connects control gaps to underlying loss scenarios, helping organizations understand how multiple weaknesses may contribute to the same business risk. For CFOs and executive teams, this provides a more financially grounded way to evaluate cybersecurity spending. For CISOs, it creates a defensible framework for explaining security priorities and communicating their potential business impact.

Transparent, Reproducible Risk Modeling — Not a Black-Box AI Score

Crush Dollar Exposure uses a quantitative methodology informed by the Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) framework and Monte Carlo simulation to model possible financial losses.

The methodology incorporates security control coverage, industry-relevant threat activity, recognized adversary techniques, organizational characteristics and established financial loss reference data.

Unlike opaque risk-scoring approaches, the capability is designed to make the assumptions, data inputs and modeled loss scenarios underlying its financial estimates visible and reviewable. Although Crush Security’s broader platform includes Cassandra, its AI-powered security advisor, the financial risk calculations themselves rely on defined quantitative modeling rather than generative AI.

The capability distinguishes between uncertainty in modeled financial outcomes and confidence in the quality of supporting data, helping executives understand both the estimated exposure and the limitations of the underlying analysis. This transparency is intended to support repeatable analysis, auditability and more defensible conversations with boards, regulators and financial stakeholders.

Giving CISOs and CFOs a Common Language

“Cybersecurity leaders are constantly asked to justify their budgets, but we’re still presenting information to boards that doesn’t directly answer the questions they’re asking,” said Josh Jones, CEO and Co-Founder of Crush Security. “Boards don’t just want to know how many vulnerabilities you have or how many security tools you’ve deployed. They want to understand what the risk could cost the business, where their money is going, and whether those investments are making a measurable difference.”

“With Crush Dollar Exposure, we’re connecting cybersecurity decisions to financial outcomes. Our goal is to give every CISO the ability to walk into a board meeting and explain their organization’s estimated financial exposure, identify the gaps driving it, and show which actions have the greatest potential to reduce that risk.” -Joshua Jones, CEO-

Built on the Crush Security Intelligence Platform

Crush Dollar Exposure extends Crush Security’s intelligence platform, which brings together vendor, control, compliance and threat data to support security investment decisions.

Powered by Cassandra, the platform helps organizations identify coverage gaps, compare technology and vendors, and optimize cybersecurity spending.

Risk calculations are performed within each customer’s data environment, with customer-specific information remaining within its designated security boundary. Anonymized and aggregated industry reference information supports comparative risk modeling.

Availability

Crush Dollar Exposure is available now within the Crush Security platform. Organizations interested in quantifying their financial cyber exposure, evaluating remediation priorities or scheduling a demonstration can visit www.CrushSecurity.com. Access information is available directly from Crush Security.

About Crush Security

Crush Security is a veteran-owned cybersecurity technology and advisory company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Its proprietary intelligence platform, advisory services and cybersecurity procurement data help customers make data-driven technology purchasing decisions leveraging Crush Security’s resell capabilities.

Cassandra, its AI-powered advisor, unifies security, vendor and compliance intelligence to identify gaps, optimize investments, quantify risk and evaluate solutions to shorten the decision time and accuracy for each project.

Crush Security’s core intelligence platform is currently included at no separate subscription cost with eligible customer engagements.

Website: www.CrushSecurity.com

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SOURCE Crush Security Group Inc

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