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Electra Unveils Turbo-Electric Aircraft Concept for Next-Generation Airliner as Part of NASA AACES 2050 Program

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Concept pairs a double-bubble lifting fuselage and electric tail fans to explore competitive gains for aircraft with 100+ passengers

MANASSAS, Va., June 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Electra, the global leader in hybrid-electric aviation, today unveiled a new conceptual aircraft design for next-generation airliners developed as part of NASA’s Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (AACES) 2050 program. The study explores how targeted electrification, advanced aerodynamics, and integrated airframe-propulsion design can transform the efficiency and competitiveness of aircraft with 100+ passengers by mid-century.

Electra’s work is rooted in the company’s view that aviation is entering a third era of flight, one defined by the ability to use new electric propulsion technologies to unlock transformative, yet achievable aircraft architectures. In Electra’s nine-passenger EL9, that approach enables ultra-short takeoff and landing and a new model of Direct Aviation. In the AACES 2050 concept, it enables a future airliner configuration designed to improve efficiency while remaining compatible with real-world airline and airport operations.

The conceptual aircraft uses a wide “double-bubble” fuselage that allows the body of the aircraft to contribute more lift, while two underwing turbofan engines produce thrust as well as electricity to power electric tail fans that ingest and re-energize slower-moving air over the fuselage, a technique known as boundary layer ingestion. Electra’s analysis found that the configuration could deliver up to a 17 percent efficiency improvement beyond gains expected by 2050 from advanced structures, engine technologies, and aerodynamic improvements.

“The value of electrification in this concept is that it lets us put the propulsion where it couldn’t go before but does the most good,” said Dr. Parker Vascik, Director of Product Strategy at Electra. “We can radically improve how the airframe and propulsion system work together while keeping the aircraft grounded in real airline and airport operations. The goal is not just efficiency on paper, but concepts that we can actually build, certify, and use.”

Electra’s concept is designed to fit within existing airport gates and airline operations, use standard jet fuel or sustainable aviation fuel, and avoid reliance on airport charging infrastructure or untested fuel types. The configuration also supports a twin-aisle cabin layout within a narrowbody aircraft class, unlocking improved passenger comfort and more efficient boarding and deplaning.

The work was led by Dr. Alejandra Uranga, Electra’s Chief Engineer for Research and Future Concepts. Dr. Uranga previously co-led NASA-sponsored research at MIT that helped advance the original double-bubble aircraft concept and D8 aircraft design. Electra’s AACES 2050 work revisits that architecture with new capabilities enabled by electrification and distributed propulsion.

“This concept builds on years of research into how airframe shape and propulsion placement can work together to improve aircraft efficiency,” said Dr. Uranga. “What is different now is the ability to use electrification and distributed propulsion to more deeply integrate those systems. Designing the aircraft as a whole system is essential to realizing the full potential of future commercial aircraft.”

In addition to the concept, Electra developed 11 technical papers documenting the models, methods, and findings behind the study. The company also adopted NASA’s open-source Aviary multidisciplinary design and optimization tool and developed an electrified aircraft design suite intended for public use. Together, these contributions are intended to help advance the broader aviation research community, not just push forward a single aircraft concept.

Electra’s AACES 2050 team brought together leaders across industry and academia, including American Airlines, Honeywell Aerospace, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Hinetics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the University of Michigan Department of Aerospace Engineering, and the University of California, Irvine’s Aircraft Systems Laboratory. 

“Through AACES, NASA is pushing the industry to think boldly, to use our novel propulsion technologies to unconstrain design thinking for the next generation of commercial aviation,” said Marc Allen, CEO of Electra. “The third era of aviation will bring radical change to how people and places connect, whether applied to aircraft entering service this decade, future regional platforms, or commercial transport by mid-century. Electra’s focus as the hybrid electric leader is to keep American aviation, and NASA, leading the way.”

The AACES 2050 program is designed to examine aircraft concepts and technologies that could help shape commercial aviation in the 2040s, 2050s, and beyond. Electra’s concept adds a near-term electrification pathway to that broader portfolio of aircraft studies, complementing other approaches focused on advanced propulsion, new fuels, and next-generation aircraft architectures.

“Electra’s aircraft concept gives American industry a chance to lead now by combining decades of research in lifting-fuselage design with breakthrough electric propulsion,” says Dr. Vascik. “Yet industry will not bring this concept to maturity by 2050 on its own. That will require a NASA-accelerated technology initiative — in a double-bubble X-plane, multi-megawatt integrated generator, and kilovolt-class power distribution — to bring these capabilities to maturity by 2035 and position industry to carry them into service by 2050.”

About Electra
Electra.aero, Inc. (Electra) is an advanced air mobility (AAM) company building hybrid-electric Ultra Short airplanes that deliver unprecedented performance advantages to fly people and cargo seamlessly without airports, emissions, or noise. With the EL9 Ultra Short, Electra is pioneering Direct Aviation, the next level of connectivity that brings air travel closer to where we live, work, and play. Electra’s Ultra Short technology delivers 2.5x the payload and 10x longer range with 70% lower operating costs than helicopters and eVTOLs with significantly greater safety and far less certification risk. 

Electra’s team includes some of the most respected and successful entrepreneurs and engineers in novel aircraft design, with over 40 prior aircraft successfully developed and/or certified. Lockheed Martin Ventures, Honeywell, and Safran are among Electra’s strategic investors along with Prysm Capital, the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), and other private investors. Electra’s contracted customers include the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and NASA along with over 2,200 letters of intent from 60+ commercial customers, including both airlines and helicopter operators.

Media Contact:
Media@electra.aero

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SOURCE Electra.aero

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CleanSpark Executives to Discuss Q3 2026 Financial Results Via Webcast

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July 30, 2026

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LAS VEGAS, July 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CleanSpark, Inc. (Nasdaq: CLSK) (“CleanSpark” or the “Company”), a market leading data center developer, will discuss its fiscal third quarter 2026 financial results via a live webcast beginning at 4:30 p.m. ET / 1:30 p.m. PT on Thursday, August 6, 2026.

Webcast Information: To view the webcast, please click here.

Downloadable files, including a transcript, will be available on the company website 48 hours after the event.

About CleanSpark 
CleanSpark (Nasdaq: CLSK), is a market-leading data center developer with a proven track record of success. We control a portfolio of more than 1.8 GW of power, land, and data centers across the United States powered by globally competitive energy prices. Sitting at the intersection of Bitcoin, energy, operational excellence, and capital stewardship, we optimize our infrastructure to deliver superior returns to our shareholders. Monetizing low-cost, high reliability energy by producing a global emerging critical resource – compute – positions us to prosper in an ever-changing world.

Investor Relations Contact
Kyle Sourk
702-989-7693
ir@cleanspark.com 

Media Contact
Eleni Stylianou
702-989-7694
pr@cleanspark.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cleanspark-executives-to-discuss-q3-2026-financial-results-via-webcast-302839455.html

SOURCE CleanSpark, Inc.

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Bloomberg Expands Electronic Trading for Onshore-Listed Australian ETFs, Options and Futures

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July 30, 2026

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SYDNEY, July 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Bloomberg today announced an expansion of its electronic trading capabilities for the Australian markets, enabling eligible onshore participants to electronically negotiate Australian-listed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) using Bloomberg’s Request-for-Quote (RFQe) workflow, alongside options and futures, following a variation amendment by ASIC.

The first transaction has been facilitated using the RFQe workflow.

Building on Bloomberg’s established Electronic Markets offering, the rule amendment enables the extension of Bloomberg’s Request-for-Quote (RFQe) workflow to include Australian-listed products. Eligible participants can now access domestic and offshore ETF markets through a single, auditable trading experience with minimal onboarding.

“At JBWere, our focus is on delivering strong investment outcomes for clients. Innovations that improve transparency, liquidity access, and execution quality support that objective by enhancing the way investment decisions are implemented,” said Daniel Walsh, Executive Advice at JBWere. “Capabilities such as RFQe contribute to a more efficient and scalable trading environment, helping us better serve clients as markets continue to evolve.”

“Australia’s exchange-traded fund markets continue to grow as investors increasingly adopt ETFs across a broader range of investment strategies,” said Ben Pool, Head of Australia and New Zealand at Bloomberg. “Extending our RFQ workflow to Australian-listed ETFs, options and futures broadens market access while giving eligible participants a consistent trading experience across domestic and global markets.”

Streamlined ETF Workflows for Australian Markets
The expanded capability provides access to competitive multi-dealer liquidity through an electronic RFQ process, replacing workflows that have traditionally relied on voice, messages or other manual methods. The workflow integrates with Bloomberg’s EMSX and AIM while providing a complete electronic audit trail.

Supporting investment, hedging and portfolio management strategies, the enhancement brings together three key Australian listed asset classes, helping firms simplify trading workflows. 

The announcement also builds on Bloomberg’s broader ETF offering in Australia, where the ETF markets have grown significantly. Together with BSKT, Bloomberg’s ETF creation and redemption solution, Bloomberg supports the full ETF lifecycle from basket management and creation/redemption to secondary market trading and execution.

Bloomberg’s Electronic Markets solutions are used by leading financial institutions to trade efficiently in over 175 markets around the world. More than 9,000 client firms use Bloomberg Electronic Markets to access industry-leading depth and breadth of liquidity across asset classes from over 1,500 dealers globally. Bloomberg Electronic Markets provides market participants with comprehensive solutions across the trading lifecycle, including robust price transparency, analytics, automation and execution, powered by Bloomberg’s high-quality, multi-asset class data and tools.

About Bloomberg
Bloomberg is a global leader in business and financial information, delivering trusted data, news, and insights that bring transparency, efficiency, and fairness to markets. The company helps connect influential communities across the global financial ecosystem via reliable technology solutions that enable our customers to make more informed decisions and foster better collaboration.

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SOURCE Bloomberg

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Smallest.ai gets $21 Million in Funding to Build Voice 4.0, the Next Generation of Enterprise Voice AI

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41 minutes ago

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July 30, 2026

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Raises $13 million Series A led by Seligman Ventures, bringing total funding to more than $21 millionIntroduces Voice 4.0 and Hydra, an asynchronous AI architecture designed  to make AI conversations as natural, responsive and scalable as human dialoguePulse STT and Lightning TTS rank among the top choices for enterprises on Artificial Analysis, leading on speed and cost efficiency across the global leaderboard

SAN FRANCISCO, July 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Smallest.ai, a San Francisco-based foundational AI research lab building the next generation of real-time voice AI infrastructure for enterprises, today announced it has surpassed $21 million in total funding following the close of a $13 million Series A led by Seligman Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and 3one4 Capital.

Industry forecasts expect the global Voice AI market to grow from $2.4 billion in 2024 to $47.5 billion by 2034, however, less than 1% of today’s global voice interactions are powered by AI. Enterprises continue to struggle with systems that sound robotic, fail under real-world complexity, introduce latency, and create operational challenges around reliability, compliance and governance. Smallest.ai is expanding its core voice AI platform across financial services, healthcare, contact centers, and business process outsourcing, where organizations are increasingly looking to deploy AI-powered voice agents at scale.

“Voice AI has gone through three generations of innovation, but each generation has ultimately hit the same wall,” said Sudarshan Kamath, founder and CEO of Smallest.ai. “The industry has focused on making models larger when the real challenge is architectural. Humans don’t wait for someone to finish speaking before they begin thinking. We listen, think, and respond simultaneously. Voice AI needs to work the same way. That’s why we built Smallest.ai around a real-time architecture that processes speech as it arrives, enabling faster, more natural conversations without sacrificing intelligence. By rethinking the stack instead of simply scaling models, we’re reducing latency to the point where voice interactions feel genuinely human.”

The End of Voice 3.0

Voice technology has evolved through three major eras:

Voice 1.0: Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems built around rigid phone trees and menu navigation.Voice 2.0: Machine learning-powered voice bots capable of basic intent recognition but unable to handle complexity.Voice 3.0: Generative AI voice agents powered by large language models that sound more natural but still rely on multiple disconnected systems working sequentially.

Today’s voice agents typically require a chain of separate technologies, including speech recognition, language models, text-to-speech systems, orchestration layers, memory systems, and guardrails. The result is high latency, brittle performance, and conversations that still feel distinctly artificial.

Beyond Voice 3.0: Introducing Voice 4.0 

Smallest.ai characterizes its innovation as Voice 4.0, a paradigm shift toward AI architectures that process listening, reasoning, action, and response in parallel. Rather than executing these functions sequentially, Voice 4.0 enables them to happen simultaneously, allowing AI systems to respond while conversations are still unfolding.

Hydra: The Architecture Behind Voice 4.0

At the center of Voice 4.0 is Hydra, Smallest.ai’s speech-to-speech model designed around asynchronous intelligence. Rather than waiting for one process to finish before starting another, Hydra performs multiple tasks in parallel, enabling real-time conversational flow, mid-conversation tool use, natural interruptions, and significantly lower latency.

Together, Hydra and Pulse STT Pro are designed to support real-time conversational interactions, with transcription latency measured in milliseconds rather than seconds.

The Smallest.ai Models

Smallest.ai’s broader platform includes Pulse STT Pro and Lightning V3.1, which rank among the top voice AI models on Artificial Analysis for speed, quality, and cost efficiency. Built for enterprise-scale deployments, Pulse STT Pro supports 38 languages and combines low-latency transcription with capabilities such as speaker diarization, emotion detection, code-switching, noise reduction, and built-in PII and PCI redaction.

Customers use Smallest.ai to automate enterprise voice workflows, reducing support costs by up to 80% while improving agent productivity by as much as 10x.

“Voice AI is creating a real impact on life and work,” said Ashish Kakran, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures. “Developers now increasingly talk to their machines instead of typing code. Smallest.ai is taking a fundamentally different approach to the category by rethinking architecture itself. Customers get an efficient vertically integrated stack and don’t need to waste time stitching models together. We believe the next generation of enterprise voice will be powered by Smallest AI.”

Smallest.ai currently works with organizations managing large-scale voice operations, including RingCentral, Truecaller, Readymode, Piramal, Kogta, Pocket, and others. The company has nearly 60 employees and plans significant expansion over the next year as demand for enterprise voice AI accelerates.

About Smallest.ai
Smallest.ai is a foundational AI research lab building the next generation of real-time voice AI infrastructure for enterprises. The company develops speech recognition, speech generation, and speech-to-speech systems designed to enable natural, scalable AI conversations across customer service, healthcare, financial services, and other high-volume communication environments. Headquartered in San Francisco, Smallest.ai serves enterprises globally through its Voice 4.0 platform and proprietary AI models. The company is backed by Seligman Ventures, Sierra Ventures, 3one4 Capital, Better Capital, Upsparks Capital, Schema Ventures, Tiny VC, DeVC, Mission Street Capital, and other angel investors.

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SOURCE Smallest.ai

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