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BrokerTech Ventures Announces BrokerTech Connect: Chicago 2026, Bringing Together Insurance and Insurtech Leaders

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DES MOINES, Iowa, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — BrokerTech Ventures (BTV), the first broker-led convening platform and accelerator focused on insurance innovation, announced its second annual BrokerTech Connect conference presented by eventual will take place September 1–2, 2026 at The Fairmont Chicago, Millennium Park.

BrokerTech Connect is a premier, intentionally curated event designed to bring together C-Suite executives, senior leaders, and decision-makers from insurance brokerages, carriers, wholesalers, startups, venture capital firms, and technology providers for two days of connection and forward-looking dialogue. Focused on quality interactions over scale, the event fosters collaboration across the insurance ecosystem through targeted programming, networking opportunities, and solution showcases — enabling attendees to exchange ideas, explore emerging technologies, and form partnerships that drive innovation forward.

“Chicago continues to be an important hub for the insurance industry, making it a natural place for this community to come together again,” said Dan Keough, Chairman & CEO of Holmes Murphy and Co-CEO of BrokerTech Ventures. “It creates a unique opportunity for important and timely dialogue, strong connections, and meaningful change.”

“The future of insurance will be driven by how effectively organizations leverage data and emerging technologies,” said Mohit Chawla, CEO of eventual. “BrokerTech Connect brings together the leaders who are rethinking how insurance operates, and we’re proud to support a forum that’s advancing innovation across the industry.”

2026 Sponsors
BTV is proud to partner with a strong lineup of sponsors that represent leaders across insurance and technology, each playing a key role in advancing innovation across the industry:

Presenting Sponsor: eventual — eventual is a modern technology company focused on helping insurance teams harness data and AI across middle and back-office workflows, accelerating processes, improving decision-making, and unlocking new growth opportunities.Happiest Hour Sponsor: FormativGroup, a Salesforce Consulting Partner, helps organizations maximize their investment in Salesforce through strategic advisory and implementation services, enabling smarter customer engagement and operational efficiency.Innovation Award Sponsors: The BrokerTech Fund — Launched in partnership between BrokerTech Ventures and ManchesterStory, the BrokerTech Fund is the first venture capital fund targeting technology startups developing solutions that specifically address the needs of insurance brokers and wholesalers to identify risks sooner and drive down costs faster.Lanyard Sponsor: Vertafore — Vertafore powers distribution velocity across the insurance ecosystem with software solutions built for the way insurance works. Combining core digital systems, specialized AI, and an unmatched data foundation, Vertafore helps organizations adapt faster and grow smarter.Breakout Sponsor: Fulcrum — Fulcrum provides insurance agencies and brokers with AI-powered automation for time-consuming tasks like proposal creation, policy checking, and coverage comparisons. By completing workflows in minutes instead of hours, Fulcrum helps teams reduce manual effort and focus on growing their book of business.Platinum Sponsor: StitchStudio — StitchStudio is an AI workflow automation platform built specifically for insurance carriers and brokers. It embeds explainable, agent-based AI to reduce manual effort and improve operational efficiency without replacing core systems.Gold Sponsor: Ascend — Ascend is the only complete financial operations platform purpose-built for insurance brokerages. Trusted by over 1,000 firms, Ascend replaces spreadsheets and manual workflows with a single system for invoicing, payments, cash application, payables, and commission reconciliation—cutting workload by 90%, improving EBITDA, and maximizing ROI on tech spend.Bronze Sponsor: Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) — Iowa is the #1 state for insurance (based on GSP) and is rapidly emerging as an insurtech hub due to affordable costs of doing business and living. The Iowa Economic Development Authority fuels this momentum by fostering a collaborative ecosystem and supporting insurtech innovation through a variety of programs.Bronze Sponsor: Cowbell — Cowbell is a pioneer in Adaptive Cyber Insurance, redefining risk transfer for the AI era. Its AI-powered platform unifies Cyber, Tech E&O, and Management Liability, enabling rapid policy issuance. Serving small and mid-market businesses globally, Cowbell combines broad coverage with resiliency services that help organizations strengthen cyber readiness and resilience.

Join the Waitlist
With attendance intentionally limited to preserve a high-quality experience, BrokerTech Connect is invitation only, but expected to draw strong interest from across the insurance and insurtech ecosystem. Those interested in attending or partnering are encouraged to learn more about the event by visiting the conference website and request their spot by joining the waitlist. Sponsorship opportunities are also available.

About BrokerTech Ventures
Based in the insurance nucleus of Des Moines, Iowa, BrokerTech Ventures (BTV) is the first broker-led convening platform and accelerator program focused on delivering innovation to the insurance broker industry. Founded in 2019, BTV provides a venue for the best minds in insurance and technology to collaborate and bring to market leading-edge ideas and solutions. BTV invests in the research and testing for each of the chosen startups, provides access to veteran industry mentors, and helps scale the technology to market through broker distribution channels. Learn more at www.brokertechventures.com, or follow us on X (@BrokerTechVen), LinkedIn, or Facebook.

Contact: Emily Schultz
emily@brokertechventures.com 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brokertech-ventures-announces-brokertech-connect-chicago-2026-bringing-together-insurance-and-insurtech-leaders-302804627.html

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Pavlov Media Employees Give Back Through Nationwide Day of Service, Contributing More Than 500 Volunteer Hours

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More than 100 team members supported local nonprofits, community organizations, and environmental initiatives across the United States.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill., Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Pavlov Media, a leading provider of fiber-optic Internet and managed Wi-Fi solutions, recently brought employees together for a company-wide Day of Service, contributing more than 500 hours of volunteer work to communities across the United States. The event builds on the company’s ongoing commitment to giving back through Pavlov Cares, its community outreach and philanthropic program.

More than 100 Pavlov Media employees participated in the initiative, dedicating their time to supporting local nonprofits, environmental conservation efforts, food assistance programs, and other community-focused organizations.

The Day of Service brought employees together around a shared commitment to making a meaningful difference in the communities where they live and work. From supporting food banks and animal rescue organizations to maintaining public spaces and assisting local nonprofits, team members stepped away from their daily responsibilities to give back.

“At Pavlov Media, our commitment to the communities we serve extends beyond providing Internet,” says Cory Douglas, CEO of Pavlov Media. “Through our Pavlov Cares program, we support organizations that strengthen the places where we live and work. Seeing more than 100 employees come together for this initiative is a reflection of the people who make up our organization.”

Making an Impact Across Communities

Employees volunteered with a variety of organizations and community initiatives, including:

Salt & Light (Champaign/Urbana, IL): Supporting community assistance programs in Central Illinois.Eastern Illinois Foodbank (Urbana, IL): Contributing to efforts addressing food insecurity.Champaign Public Library (Champaign, IL): Supporting a valuable community resource.Champaign County Forest Preserve District (Champaign County, IL): Assisting with invasive plant removal and botanical garden maintenance.Moore’s Rescue Ranch/Kitty Crib (Urbana, IL): Supporting local animal rescue and care efforts.Aikman Wildlife Adventure (Arcola, IL): Enhancing visitor spaces through grounds maintenance and revitalizing the indoor play area.Atlanta Food Bank (Atlanta, GA): Supporting efforts to address food insecurity in Georgia.GRACE Marketplace (Gainesville, FL): Supporting programs assisting individuals experiencing homelessness.Corinth Park District (Corinth, TX): Helping maintain community parks and recreational spaces. 

Connecting Through Community Service

Pavlov Media’s Day of Service provided employees with an opportunity to collaborate outside the workplace while supporting organizations that make a difference in their communities.

With more than 500 hours of service contributed nationwide, the initiative reflects the collective impact employees can make when they come together for a shared purpose.

Through our Pavlov Cares program, Pavlov Media continues to support local and national organizations dedicated to strengthening communities and improving lives. The company’s Day of Service reflects this ongoing commitment, bringing employees together to make a meaningful difference beyond their everyday work.

Learn more about Pavlov Cares at www.pavlovmedia.com/pavlov-cares/.

About Pavlov Media

Pavlov Media is a provider of fiber-optic Internet and managed Wi-Fi solutions serving residential communities, multifamily properties, student housing, and businesses across the United States. With a focus on connectivity, innovation, and customer experience, Pavlov Media delivers Internet solutions designed to meet the evolving needs of the communities it serves.

Learn more at https://mdu.pavlovmedia.com/

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Urban Outfitters Invites Everyone to the Party with “All Together Now: More the Merrier” Holiday Campaign

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Rooted in Gen Z insights, UO celebrates the season with the most coveted gifts, festive fashion, and community experiences, kicking off with a holiday celebration in partnership with DoorDash.

PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Urban Outfitters is inviting everyone to the party this holiday season with the launch of “All Together Now: More the Merrier,” an omnichannel campaign that taps into the personal style and shared experiences that make the season special. Building on the brand’s All Together Now platform, the campaign celebrates the joy of coming together and captures the excitement of the season, from getting ready and finding the perfect outfit to showing up and celebrating with friends.

At the heart of the campaign is UO’s understanding of how Gen Z lives, shops, and celebrates. Insights from UO Insiders, the brand’s community of more than 10,000 Gen Z shoppers, students, and influencers, reveal that 85% of Gen Z shoppers self-gift during the holidays—purchasing an average of seven to eight items for themselves. Alongside self-gifting, 78% of Gen Z prefer to shop with someone else, underscoring this generation’s focus on community and togetherness.

“At Urban Outfitters, everything starts with understanding our customer,” said Shea Jensen, President of Urban Outfitters. “More the Merrier brings together the products, brands, and experiences they love, with new ways to discover and make the holiday season even more memorable.”

The campaign kicked off with an exclusive launch party in Los Angeles on November 5, reuniting members of UO’s always-on community, including Meet Me@UO Joshua Tree attendees, All Together Now commercial cast members, and Game Day student ambassadors. Designed for connection, creativity, and community, the evening featured seasonal activations, including white elephant, customization stations, and a surprise UO Live performance by Grammy-nominated artist DESTIN CONRAD. The party was brought to life in partnership with DoorDash, building on the UO’s strategy to make last-minute gifting and getting-ready essentials more accessible through on-demand delivery.

Extending the celebration beyond Los Angeles, UO brings the ultimate holiday house party to life across its digital channels and stores through doorbell-inspired creative, festive editorial imagery and specialized gift shops. Content from the campaign’s editorial shoot extends the house party atmosphere across social and digital channels, with select video content featured on connected TV (CTV) platforms, including Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+ and Peacock.

The in-store and online UO Holiday Gift Shop features a curated assortment of exclusive collections and seasonal must-haves across apparel, footwear, beauty, and home. New Analog Gifting, Scent Shop, and Cozy Shop destinations bring the season’s most coveted gifts to life, curated around Gen Z’s evolving shopping habits and interests.

With giving at the heart of the season, UO is continuing to put community first through its three-month Giving Season initiative, running November to January. Alongside ongoing brand donations, customers can make contributions at checkout to support six of UO’s longstanding nonprofit partners: Altadena Girls, Active Minds, Creatives Want Change, Glisten, Rock to the Future, and Asian Arts Initiative.

For more information, visit urbanoutfitters.com.

About Urban Outfitters
Urban Outfitters is a global lifestyle brand dedicated to fueling the next generation’s individuality through a unique blend of product, creativity, music, and youth culture. Founded in 1970 in a small space across from the University of Pennsylvania, Urban Outfitters now operates over 200 stores across the United States, Canada, and Europe, alongside a dynamic digital presence. Empowering bold self-expression, Urban Outfitters leads with its distinctive designs and curated selection of women’s, men’s, accessories, and home products, and best-in-class brand partnerships. For more information, visit Urban Outfitters at www.urbanoutfitters.com.

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ExpertCrowd and HUD Collaborate to Advance AI Training and Evaluation, Release SWE Benchmark

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SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ExpertCrowd, Toptal‘s platform for training and improving AI models and systems, today announced a collaboration with HUD, a Y Combinator-backed startup that provides tools for building AI training data through its DataVendor™ marketplace. Together, the teams released ExpertCrowd-SWE, a software engineering benchmark that evaluates the performance of frontier-grade LLMs and coding agents.

As AI systems take on increasingly complex work, measuring their capabilities requires tasks that reflect professional practice and grading criteria that capture what successful execution actually means. This collaboration brings together ExpertCrowd’s expert-led task development and HUD’s infrastructure for running complex RL environments.

ExpertCrowd and HUD co-developed ExpertCrowd-SWE, bringing together engineers from Toptal’s global network of highly skilled domain experts with HUD’s experience collaborating with frontier research teams. After Toptal’s experts authored tasks and grading rubrics, HUD’s infrastructure hosted task-run environments and verified the benchmarks against internal quality assurance pipelines. HUD and Toptal’s AI research teams, composed of more than a dozen PhDs and researchers with educational or professional experience at Harvard, EPFL, the University of Liège, DeepMind, Qwen, and ByteDance, reviewed and assessed the methodology and results to build one of the most robust software engineering benchmarks in the industry.

“ExpertCrowd puts practitioners at the center of defining the work AI systems should perform and judging how well they perform it. By combining that specialized expertise with HUD’s testing infrastructure, we’re advancing what AI systems can achieve and setting a higher standard for real-world performance,” said Taso Du Val, founder and CEO of Toptal.

ExpertCrowd-SWE is the first release of an ongoing Toptal-HUD collaboration, with additional initiatives in development and further announcements coming soon. Building on this foundation, ExpertCrowd and HUD will bring more specialized human expertise into the tasks, environments, and evaluations that support the next generation of AI.

“We built HUD’s infrastructure to give research teams the tools to create realistic RL training environments, run evaluations across AI models, and inspect model performance. ExpertCrowd put that infrastructure to work, bringing the professional expertise to translate complex, real-world workflows into rigorous tasks, reference outputs, and evaluation frameworks that test the limits of today’s leading AI models,” said Jay Ram, founder and CEO of HUD.

About ExpertCrowd

ExpertCrowd is Toptal’s platform for training and improving AI models and systems through RLHF, RL data generation, data labeling, and model evaluation. It is powered by Toptal’s global talent network, with more than 30,000 specialized domain experts across 140+ countries, including more than 2,000 AI and big data specialists, 12,000 professionals with advanced degrees, and 1,000 PhD-level AI specialists, available on demand. For more information, please visit ExpertCrowd.com.

About HUD

HUD is a platform for building reinforcement learning environments, used by startups, Fortune 500 companies, and frontier labs. It provides infrastructure for training models, evaluating AI agents, and creating the post-training data that aligns AI to organizations’ work. HUD’s mission is to build reliable, fair, and open infrastructure for AI data with the goal of making data valuable for the people who create it and trustworthy for the labs that train on it. DataVendor™ is HUD’s marketplace, which allows AI labs to license training and evaluation data directly from the companies that created it. For more information, please visit HUD.ai.

Contact

Luiz Baia
SVP of Marketing Strategy
luiz.baia@toptal.com

SOURCE Toptal

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