Former Global CTO of Banco Santander, former Group CIO of Currys, former CEO of IBPAP, and former Microsoft CVP and CTO of AI join the advisory community

Advisors will provide guidance on AAVA platform innovation, AI strategy, C-suite alignment, and enterprise adoption across Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, and the UK

The growing community of advisors will bring practitioner perspective closer to Ascendion as enterprises move AI from experimentation to governed, production-scale outcomes

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., Oct. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ascendion, an AI-native software engineering company, today announced the appointment of four global business and technology leaders to its AI Advisory Community: Andy Gamble, Jack Madrid, Julieta Ross, Ph.D., and Joseph Sirosh, Ph.D. 

The advisors bring perspectives rarely found in one group: executives who answered to Boards, regulators, and C-suites for what technology actually delivered; a builder of AI and data platforms at global scale; and a leader who shaped one of the world’s largest technology-services and talent ecosystems. Their experience spans banking, high-tech, media, and retail. Each will work directly with Ascendion’s regional and engineering leaders, so their counsel reaches the decisions it is meant to shape. 

“We are changing how software gets built. Enterprise leaders have moved past experiments. They want AI that delivers outcomes boards can measure and risk they can manage. Andy, Jack, Julieta, and Joseph have the experience and know where transformation succeeds. They will challenge our thinking, raise our ambition, and help us navigate a period of intense — and exciting — change,” said Karthik Krishnamurthy, CEO, Ascendion. 

Each advisor will map to a different part of the business, strengthening Ascendion’s alignment with leadership communities across the globe. 

Julieta Ross, Ph.D., former Global CTO of Banco Santander, brings two decades of leading technology inside global banks, along with public-company board experience. She will work with Ascendion’s leadership on executive relationships, go-to-market strategy, and growth, and will help the company meet the governance, regulatory, and risk expectations that banking and financial services leaders place on AI. Andy Gamble, former Group CIO of Currys plc, has spent nearly three decades as a technology buyer and transformation leader across consumer electronics, industrial, and retail businesses. He will advise Ascendion’s work across Europe and the UK, with a focus on consumer goods, manufacturing, and retail, and will share what executive teams and Boards expect from a technology partner. Joseph Sirosh, Ph.D., former Microsoft CVP and CTO of AI, has spent his career building and scaling machine learning platforms in the high-tech industry. He will advise Ascendion’s engineering leadership on the evolution of AAVA and its broader platform strategy as AAVA becomes an orchestration and harness layer for enterprise AI. Jack Madrid, former President and CEO of IBPAP, spent five years leading the industry association behind one of the world’s largest technology and business-services ecosystems, centered in the Philippines. He brings robust experience working across industries, including banking, high-tech, and media, and will advise Ascendion on Asia-Pacific markets and on how AI is reshaping global delivery, skills, and workforce models. 

Together, the advisors give Ascendion an outside perspective on the full spectrum of enterprise AI, from agentic platform strategy and product engineering to industry alignment and delivery. They will add capacity to Ascendion’s ongoing work on AI governance, helping ensure trusted impact from AI-native software engineering, and their practice-based insight will inform how Ascendion applies its Engineering to the Power of AI™ approach to commercial models, platform design, service execution, and workforce development. 

About Ascendion

Ascendion is a global AI-native software engineering company delivering trusted business outcomes – capital unlock, innovation velocity, lower risk – to 250+ enterprise clients. The company delivers business outcomes at scale by combining expert engineers, AI agents, and AAVA, Ascendion’s agentic AI platform. Together, they design, engineer, and operate production-ready software that improves everyday work and life. Learn more at www.ascendion.com.

Engineering to the Power of AI™, Engineering to Elevate Life™, and AAVA™ are trademarks or service marks of Ascendion. AAVA™ is pending registration. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

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NEW YORK, Oct. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — AvePoint Inc. (NASD: AVPT) will replace LXP Industrial Trust (NYSE: LXP) in the S&P SmallCap 600 effective prior to the opening of trading on Monday, November 2. Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are acquiring LXP Industrial Trust in a deal expected to close soon, pending final closing conditions.

Following is a summary of the changes that will take place prior to the open of trading on the effective date:

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S&P Dow Jones Indices is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), which provides essential intelligence for individuals, companies, and governments to make decisions with confidence. For more information, visit www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/. 

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The round will help Archera expand its guaranteed cloud commitments, bringing insurance-backed financial protection to companies navigating unpredictable AI and cloud spending. The company has delivered more than $700 million in customer savings and now manages approximately $5.6 billion in annual cloud and AI spend.

BELLEVUE, Wash., Oct. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — As artificial intelligence makes cloud spending harder to predict, companies face an increasingly expensive choice: commit to long-term cloud and AI contracts to unlock significant discounts or preserve flexibility and leave savings on the table. Archera has raised a $15 million Series C to expand its Guaranteed Commitments and change that equation.

The cloud economics company today announced it closed its Series C funding round, led by Pivot Investment Partners, with participation from existing investors including HighSage Ventures. The financing brings Archera’s total funding to $38.3 million. It will support the expansion of Archera’s Guaranteed Commitments and its suite of free cloud cost tools, including its FinOps Agent and MCP.

Insurance-backed financial protection is central to Archera’s next phase of growth. Archera purchased a policy on a surplus lines basis from Crum & Forster Specialty Insurance Company to back its guarantee. This model helps businesses pursue cloud commitment savings while managing the financial risk of usage changes.

The company has delivered more than $700 million in savings to over 2,200 organizations, including PubNub, Art.com, and Astronomer. The thesis behind Archera is simple: companies shouldn’t have to predict AI’s future to commit and save money on today’s infrastructure.

Why Cloud and AI Commitments Need to Change

Cloud providers reward customers who commit to spending over one- to three-year periods with substantial discounts and access to capacity. Historically, those commitments have helped businesses reduce infrastructure costs. But AI is changing the risk and economics of that decision.

A new model launch can multiply GPU spending in months. A more efficient model, a shift in architecture, or a move to a different service can reduce it just as quickly. Long-term commitments that once looked financially sound can become expensive liabilities.

Companies are left choosing between overcommitting and risking unused spend, or undercommitting and missing out on available discounts. Many choose the latter, sacrificing potential savings to preserve flexibility.

Archera believes that the trade-off is unnecessary. Its Guaranteed Commitments provide resource-level cloud and AI discounts with terms as short as 30 days. If usage declines and a covered commitment goes unused, Archera covers the cost under the terms of its guarantee.

The result is a different way to approach cloud purchasing. Businesses can pursue deeper discounts and unlock capacity otherwise gated behind a commitment, without bearing the entire financial consequence when actual usage diverges from forecasts.

Turning Cloud Optimization Into a Financial Product

Traditional cloud cost management tools provide visibility, recommendations, automation, and forecasting, but they can’t eliminate the financial risk of unused commitments. Archera combines its free FinOps platform and Agent with a financial guarantee that addresses inaccurate forecasts.

“Every tool in this market is trying to forecast your cloud usage a little better. We think that’s the wrong bet,” said Aran Khanna, co-founder and CEO of Archera. “Nobody can forecast AI demand, not the customer, not the cloud provider. So instead of predicting it, we guarantee it, and we have purchased an insurance policy to back that guarantee. If covered usage drops, we address the unused commitment cost under the terms of our guarantee. That’s a new way to purchase cloud, not another dashboard, and it’s why we’ve been able to return $700 million to our customers.”

The approach positions cloud commitments as a financial risk decision, helping finance and engineering leaders manage budgets while adapting to changing technology.

Built for CFOs, CTOs, and the Teams Managing AI Costs

The approach addresses a growing challenge across finance and engineering: how to control infrastructure costs without constraining the business.

For CFOs: Capture commitment-level discounts while reducing exposure to eligible unused spend under the guarantee.For CTOs and engineering leaders: Preserve flexibility to adopt new AI models, change architectures, and scale workloads without letting past commitments dictate future decisions.For FinOps teams: Increase commitment coverage with a financial backstop when usage changes, without more back-and-forth with engineering teams to get perfect forecasts.For cloud partners and resellers: Give customers a differentiated way to pursue cloud savings that can be reinvested in new cloud services while managing commitment risk.

Archera’s platform connects to AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud billing data in read-only mode and analyzes actual usage. It then recommends and automates the purchasing of both native commitments and Archera Guaranteed Commitments.

Customers can evaluate their potential savings before making any purchasing decision. Commitments remain in the customer’s own cloud account, preserving end-to-end control over cloud purchasing strategy.

Archera earns when customers save through its guaranteed commitments, aligning its commercial model with the outcomes customers seek.

Customers Are Rethinking the Commitment Model

For organizations accustomed to treating cloud commitments as a single, high-stakes decision, Archera offers a more flexible approach.

“Working with Archera meant rethinking commitments as a spectrum rather than a single, high-stakes decision,” said James Hamilton, VP of Operations and Controller at PubNub. “This was a big mind shift for us. We needed to think about how our commitments could be broken up into a spectrum of purchases versus a single one-time buy.”

That flexibility is particularly valuable as companies adopt AI workloads, where technology choices and resource requirements can shift faster than traditional budgeting cycles.

Instead of making one large bet on future usage, businesses can take a more measured approach while still securing meaningful discounts.

A Series C to Expand Insurance-Backed Cloud Purchasing

Archera has been operating profitably at scale. It raised a Series C to support larger guarantees, expand its reach, serve more customers, and upgrade the insurance policies backing its guarantee to serve larger global clients.

The company plans to use the capital in three ways:

Accelerate go-to-market efforts.Expand its global partner network across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, and Latin America.Serve more teams focused on AI-driven workloads.

“Archera has built a capital-efficient and differentiated business at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and risk management,” said Dinkar Jetley, co-founder and managing partner at Pivot Investment Partners. “The team pairs a deep understanding of the cloud ecosystem with a rigorous approach to underwriting, and the result is a compelling value proposition that a fast-growing roster of customers relies on as their cloud spend scales. We are privileged to have led this Series C round and look forward to working closely with Aran and the management team in the years ahead.”

Built by People Who Understand Cloud Infrastructure

Aran and Nikhil Khanna founded Archera in 2019. Aran previously planned capacity for Azure’s core compute and database services at Microsoft and was a founding member of AWS’s deep learning team leading launches, including SageMaker, DeepLens, and the Neuron SDK, behind Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia AI chips.

His research on deep learning model efficiency has been cited more than 1,900 times, and he serves on the FinOps Foundation governing board.

As AI transforms infrastructure economics, Archera aims to make cloud savings more accessible without forcing businesses to assume unnecessary financial risk.

To explore potential savings, request a free assessment at Archera.ai.

Free savings assessment: https://app.archera.ai/savings-estimate?utm_source=forbes&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=series-c-2026

Name: Sarah
Email Address: shiara@archera.ai
Phone Number: +13018255007

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SOURCE Archera