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Opportunity Finance Network and Mastercard Announce Partnership to Strengthen the CDFI Small Business Lending Sector

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The initiative will develop new structures, systems, and solutions to transform small business lending within community development finance

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Opportunity Finance Network, the nation’s leading network and intermediary focused on community development investment, announced a partnership with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. The partnership will support the Infrastructure for Scale CDFI3 Innovation Initiative to transform small business lending. This two-year partnership will help create new solutions, capital, and financial products for small business-focused community development financial institutions (CDFIs).

“Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, yet millions of hardworking entrepreneurs can’t access the capital needed to pursue dreams,” said OFN President and CEO Harold Pettigrew. “Small business CDFIs provide critical financing for entrepreneurs starting or growing their businesses, helping them build wealth and create quality jobs. With the Center’s investment in the CDFI3 Innovation Initiative, OFN will further develop the infrastructure for these specialized lenders and expand support for more small businesses in underinvested communities across the country.”

OFN seeks to address the large-scale challenges affecting the CDFI small business ecosystem. With assistance from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, OFN will support sustained industry growth and facilitate the flow of reasonably priced small business capital into low- and moderate- income communities. OFN is excited to participate in the Mastercard Strive USA community alongside other practice leaders in small business lending.

“Mastercard and the Center are deeply committed to supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs across the U.S.,” said Sandy Fernandez, Vice President of Social Impact, Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. “OFN’s network of CDFIs and mission-driven lenders has the unique ability to meet these entrepreneurs where they are and provide critical support through capital and technical assistance to nurture successful businesses. We’re proud to support OFN’s innovation initiative that will build the infrastructure for CDFIs to support more small businesses nationwide.”

The years ahead will introduce unprecedented opportunities and pose significant challenges for the CDFI industry. The CDFI3 Innovation Initiative is structured to help CDFIs meet the moment ahead with new strategies, including:

The creation of the Innovation Advisory Council to provide thought leadership and turn data-driven insights into scalable innovations.The establishment of the Innovation Center, an action tank that will take insights and promising solutions and seed them with capital and support.

Although the CDFI industry has grown significantly, the supply of affordable capital does not meet the scale of ambition among entrepreneurs in underserved communities. This partnership will specifically focus on transforming the small business ecosystem for greater scale, impact and capital to flow to historically underserved communities.

The CDFI3 Innovation Initiative will be at the center of OFN’s strategic direction for the next five years and beyond. These programs will reinforce the industry’s ability to foster financial health and resilience in low-income communities, expand entrepreneurship and affordable housing, and accelerate economic opportunity. 

About Opportunity Finance Network

Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) is the nation’s leading network and intermediary focused on community development investment, managing over $1 billion in total assets and a membership of more than 450 community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which includes community development loan funds, credit unions, green banks, banks, minority depository institutions, and venture capital funds. Our network of CDFIs works to ensure communities underserved by mainstream finance have access to affordable, responsible financial products and services, with a deep focus on serving rural, urban, and Native communities across the United States. OFN is a trusted investment partner to the public, private, and philanthropic sectors – foundations, corporations, banks, government agencies, and others – and, for 40 years, has helped partners invest in communities to catalyze change and create economic opportunities for all.

Since its founding in 1986, OFN members have originated over $110 billion in financing, helping to create or maintain more than 3 million jobs, start or expand more than 850,000 businesses and microenterprises, and support the development or rehabilitation of nearly 2.4 million housing units and more than 14,000 community facility projects.

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SOURCE Opportunity Finance Network

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/C O R R E C T I O N — Applied Intuition, Inc./

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In the news release, Applied Intuition Collaborates with Heidelberg Materials to Advance Innovation in Quarry Operations with Autonomous Haulage Fleets, issued 30-Apr-2026 by Applied Intuition, Inc. over PR Newswire, we are advised by the company that changes have been made. The complete, corrected release follows, with additional details at the end:

Applied Intuition Collaborates with Heidelberg Materials to Advance Innovation in Quarry Operations with Autonomous Haulage Fleets

Deployment brings intelligent, vehicle-based autonomy to Australia, establishing a new operating model for construction and mining environments.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 30, 2026 /CNW/ — Applied Intuition, Inc., a leader in physical AI, today announced its collaboration with Heidelberg Materials, one of the world’s largest integrated manufacturers of building materials and solutions, to deploy autonomous haulage systems for Heidelberg Materials’ quarry operations, starting at a site in Australia.

Applied Intuition will provide its Self-Driving System (SDS) for Construction to support autonomous haulage operations within Heidelberg Materials’ fleet of construction and mining vehicles in Australia. The deployment marks the next real-world application of Applied Intuition’s autonomy platform in industrial environments. Upon successful completion, it will support the expansion of autonomous operations within Heidelberg Materials’ broader Australian network.

The collaboration also challenges the standard industry model. While autonomy solutions traditionally target the largest quarry sites, this system is designed for smaller operations, including those running just two 40-ton trucks, making it deployable across quarry sites of varying size worldwide.

“No two quarry or construction sites operate the same way, with different layouts, constraints and economics,” said Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. “We’ve built our platform to adapt to that reality. This partnership shows we can take the same core system used in large mining operations and apply it to smaller, infrastructure-constrained quarry sites, scaling it across hundreds of unique locations.”

For Heidelberg Materials, the partnership is aimed at enhancing safety and operational performance. It also reflects the need for an autonomy solution that can operate at large sites and smaller ones too, whereas traditional autonomous haulage systems are often too infrastructure-heavy or costly to scale. For Applied Intuition, it serves as a proof point that its autonomy platform is designed not just for one-off deployments, but for global scale across construction, quarry and mining environments of any size.

Applied Intuition’s system runs directly on the vehicle, with integrated perception, decision-making and safety systems onboard, enabling reliable operation without constant connectivity or heavy site infrastructure.

The collaboration builds on Applied Intuition’s growing presence in construction and mining autonomy and reinforces its broader physical AI strategy. The same core platform has already been deployed in other industries, including trucking and defense, with learnings from each domain contributing to continuous system improvements. Applied Intuition’s SDS platform strategy also enables the company to bring technologies proven in other domains into construction and mining, helping accelerate development and deployment.

Through this project, Applied Intuition demonstrates the range of its autonomy platform, from some of the largest mining trucks in the world to smaller quarry vehicles operating in constrained, lower-infrastructure environments. Together, these deployments highlight the company’s approach to building scalable autonomy for construction and mining from the ground up.

To learn more about how Applied Intuition is building the future of construction autonomy, visit applied.co.

About Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Gothenburg, Sweden; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co.

Correction: An earlier version of this release incorrectly stated the location of the site noted in the first paragraph.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/applied-intuition-collaborates-with-heidelberg-materials-to-advance-innovation-in-quarry-operations-with-autonomous-haulage-fleets-302758224.html

SOURCE Applied Intuition, Inc.

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MOREH Demonstrates Production-Ready LLM Inference on Tenstorrent Galaxy, Achieving DGX A100-Class Performance with Improved Cost Efficiency

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Reduces HBM Costs with GPU–Tenstorrent Heterogeneous Distributed Serving
First unveiled at Tenstorrent’s launch event, TT-Deploy, in San Francisco on May 1

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Moreh, an AI infrastructure software company, led by CEO Gangwon Jo, announced that it has successfully validated LLM inference performance on the Tenstorrent Galaxy Wormhole system using its proprietary ‘MoAI Inference Framework.’

Based on tests across leading Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models—including GPT-OSS, Qwen, GLM, and DeepSeek—Moreh achieved LLM inference performance on Tenstorrent Galaxy Wormhole matching or surpassing NVIDIA DGX A100-class systems, demonstrating a compelling alternative to conventional GPU-centric AI infrastructure.

Moreh also improved cost efficiency by implementing a disaggregated serving architecture that combines GPUs with Tenstorrent Wormhole chips. By utilizing Tenstorrent processors as dedicated prefill accelerators, the company reduced reliance on high-cost HBM and lowered overall infrastructure costs.

The results were first unveiled at Tenstorrent’s launch event, TT-Deploy, held on May 1 in San Francisco.

As a strategic partner of Tenstorrent and a major external contributor to Metalium, Moreh showcased a live LLM inference demo at the event. Building on its experience operating AMD GPU-based production environments in real-world data centers, the company presented its latest technical achievements in ‘Production-Ready LLM Inference on Tenstorrent Galaxy.’

MoAI Inference Framework is a disaggregated inference solution that enables unified operation of heterogeneous GPUs and NPUs—including NVIDIA, AMD, and Tenstorrent—within a single cluster. This allows enterprises to build flexible AI infrastructure strategies without vendor lock-in.

Moreh CEO Gangwon Jo stated, “Achieving production-grade LLM inference performance and stability on Tenstorrent-based systems marks a significant milestone,” and added, “We will continue to enhance performance through deeper optimization across heterogeneous architectures and closer integration with Tenstorrent NPUs.”

Moreh is developing its own core AI infrastructure engine and, through its foundation LLM subsidiary Motif Technologies, is building end-to-end capabilities spanning both infrastructure and model domains. Simultaneously, the company is making its mark in the global market through collaborations with key partners such as AMD, Tenstorrent, and SGLang.

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SOURCE Moreh

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US Startup PerZeption Inc. Announces Collaboration with Alcon Research

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BOSTON, MA, May. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Advancements in vision correction evaluation require methods that offer both precision and efficiency in detecting clinically meaningful visual differences. Addressing this need, PerZeption is set to present new data validating its AIM+ CSF modeling technology at the Association of Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) annual meeting.

Attendees are invited to learn more about this innovative approach during the poster session on May 4, 2026, from 11:15 AM to 1:00 PM, at posterboard #0941.

“We are very excited to collaborate with Alcon, one of the largest companies within the Ophthalmology sector worldwide. “, Dr. Jan Skerswetat said. “The results, presented by Dr Derek Nankivil, indicate that our technology enables rapid, repeatable, and highly sensitive assessment of contrast vision.”

The abstract, titled ‘AIM+ CSF modeling enables efficient detection of clinically meaningful visual differences,’ outlines how PerZeption’s technology supports sensitive, low-burden visual assessment for vision correction evaluation. Data indicates that with approximately six adaptive displays of stimuli and two repeats, studies show around 20 subjects can achieve 90% power to detect a 1 JND (Just Noticeable Difference) change in AULCSF (Area Under the Log Contrast Sensitivity Function). This research also demonstrates AIM+ CSF’s stable repeatability in less than 3 minutes, absence of bias, and robust performance, validating its role as an effective tool for objective visual performance evaluation.

This joint effort highlights a shared dedication to advancing ophthalmology research and developing precise tools for visual assessment. The ARVO annual meeting serves as the world’s foremost event for ophthalmology research, offering a vital platform for sharing scientific breakthroughs and fostering dialogue within the global vision science community.

“In addition to all the exciting research presentations that leverage PerZeption technology at this years’ ARVO meeting, we are also proud to be showcasing PerZeption’s battery of functional tests at our booth, #4027.” Dr. Skerswetat added and noted that there will be opportunities to try out our technology.

This presentation at ARVO represents a significant step in the validation and recognition of PerZeption’s contributions to advanced visual assessment technologies.

About PerZeption Inc
PerZeption delivers vision testing with a rapid, self-administered, and adaptive psychophysical platform delivered via cloud-based software on standard tablets or all-in-one computers. Our flagship platform, Angular Indication Measurement (AIM), enables testing of over 20 visual functions. Our novel approach equips researchers and clinicians with a comprehensive range of visual functions and introduces new tests for which there are no currently available devices. We reduce chairtime. Self-administered tests on a single device in combination with proprietary methods that rapidly assess vision, reduce user’s burden and require minimal training or space, unlike bulky, specialized single-use devices. Finally, cloud-based delivery supports secure in-clinic and remote testing, ensuring consistent, trackable results for clinicians and pharmaceutical companies. 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-startup-perzeption-inc-announces-collaboration-with-alcon-research-302760563.html

SOURCE PerZeption

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