New agreements extend Mindstream’s platform beyond energy and modular data centers into AI strategy, application development, and advanced immersion cooling

HOUSTON, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Mindstream Energy announced today the execution of strategic collaboration agreements with CodeZero Group, a UK-based global AI consulting and application development firm, and Green Revolution Cooling, Inc. (GRC), a leading provider of single-phase immersion cooling technology.

Together, the agreements expand Mindstream’s ability to deliver end-to-end sovereign AI and digital infrastructure solutions to governments, enterprises, and strategic industries across the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond.

The announcement builds on recent Al-Risha project milestones, including Mindstream’s long-term Natural Gas Supply Agreement with Jordan’s National Petroleum Company (NPC).

The collaborations strengthen Mindstream’s Al-Risha Sovereign AI and Digital Infrastructure Platform, developed adjacent to Jordan’s Al-Risha natural gas field and designed to scale to approximately 400 megawatts serving Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and the broader MENA region.

While Mindstream remains focused on secure, energy-first AI infrastructure, these new relationships extend its capabilities well beyond the physical data center.

Through CodeZero, Mindstream will help governments and enterprise customers evaluate AI use cases, assess compute requirements, select the right infrastructure, and develop custom AI applications tailored to their objectives, moving organizations from AI strategy to practical deployment aligned with business, government, and national priorities.

Combined with Mindstream’s modular deployment model, scaling to demand with order-to-delivery timelines of four months, these expanded capabilities let customers move seamlessly from AI strategy and workload assessment through deployment, application development, and long-term operational support.

“Sovereign AI can’t be built one layer at a time,” said Mark F. Thimmig, Chairman & CEO of Mindstream Energy. “Energy, compute, cooling, and application design have to work together from day one, or the infrastructure can’t keep pace with the workloads it was built for. CodeZero and GRC help us close that gap for partners across the region.”

The Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) collaboration expands Mindstream’s portfolio of high-density computing solutions through one of the industry’s most established patented immersion cooling platforms. GRC’s expertise in advanced thermal management adds design flexibility and broadens the range of high-performance AI environments Mindstream can offer, including deployments in demanding, high-temperature climates without reliance on external water cooling.

The recent collaborations create a framework for jointly pursuing sovereign AI initiatives, digital infrastructure projects, government modernization programs, and enterprise AI opportunities across Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other markets.

Mindstream believes sovereign AI requires far more than compute access; it depends on secure energy infrastructure, the right AI architecture, advanced cooling, application expertise, and long-term operational support. These new capabilities position the company to deliver integrated, end-to-end solutions across each of those requirements.

As the Al-Risha platform advances toward initial operations, Mindstream welcomes discussions with governments, strategic investors, enterprise customers, technology providers, systems integrators, and organizations seeking to leverage its sovereign AI infrastructure or collaborate on next-generation AI solutions across the Middle East and North Africa.

About Mindstream Energy

Mindstream Energy is developing the Al-Risha Sovereign AI and Digital Infrastructure Platform in Jordan, an energy-first, modular AI campus delivering secure sovereign AI, high-performance computing, digital infrastructure, and AI application enablement for governments, enterprises, and strategic industries across the Middle East and North Africa. The platform is designed to scale to approximately 400 MW and serve as a foundation for regional sovereign AI deployment.

For additional information, strategic partnership opportunities, or investor inquiries, visit www.mindstreamenergy.com or contact info@mindstreamenergy.com.

Media Contact:
George Pappas
Conservaco / The Ignite Agency
562-857-5680
419592@email4pr.com
www.conservaco.com

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SOURCE Mindstream Energy

Seed round led by Castle Island Ventures backs the neutral infrastructure setting the standard for onchain execution quality.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Birdai Labs, which builds infrastructure to measure, verify, and improve how trades execute on high-performance blockchains, today announced a $4 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept. The company is building a transparent path to better execution for traders and market makers, and a healthier market for the validators who secure it. The raise comes as the industry’s fastest blockchains converge on multi-proposer architectures, a design shift that fragments control over transaction ordering and makes execution quality the next competitive frontier. The round will fund senior engineering hires and extend the company’s infrastructure at the base of the chain.

Onchain markets have a quiet problem: value is taken from the traders who create it, in the gap between an order and its fill, with no standard to measure it and no way to get it back. Birdai Labs was built to change that.

Birdai Labs was founded and self-funded by Kevin Farrelly and Greg Scanlon, who built the company’s initial infrastructure before raising outside capital. Farrelly previously founded Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning credit company acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2018, where he spent seven years building the firm’s blockchain venture programs. Scanlon is a former Citadel Senior Quantitative Trader who joined Farrelly at Franklin Templeton to build that early-stage venture practice, and built Birdai Labs’ core technology. Farrelly is a proven builder with a successful exit, and both he and Scanlon spent years inside some of the world’s largest traditional finance firms running due diligence on hundreds of early-stage blockchain companies. Watching so many teams win and fail in the blockchain world taught them that data beats narrative, and that the strongest protocols start from what a market does, not the category it claims. Seeing this market from both the builder’s chair and the institutional allocator’s seat while letting the data lead is where the company’s thesis comes from.

Recently, the company expanded the team with the addition of James McClain as founding quantitative researcher. A top-tier quantitative hedge fund veteran with a PhD from Princeton, McClain anchors the company’s quantitative research alongside Scanlon.

Traditional markets earned institutional participation by making execution quality measurable and enforceable, through frameworks like Regulation NMS and order-handling disclosure. The rules for digital assets are still being written. What is not in doubt is what institutions will require before they participate at scale: better execution, fairness, and transparency. Birdai Labs is building the onchain analog: neutral infrastructure that is built to improve execution and make it provable, so participants can meet that standard however the rules arrive.

Most infrastructure starts from theory. Birdai Labs was built from decoded transaction data. The record of how transactions are timed, sequenced, and propagated exists only at the base of a chain. Public APIs show what settled; the base layer shows how. Birdai Labs operates its own infrastructure giving it a ground-truth view of execution. It uses that view not to report on the market, but to change it. Any improvement it delivers is verifiable against the chain itself.

Because it operates from inside the market, Birdai Labs acts at the layer where execution is actually decided, and is built to return value to the participants who create order flow rather than extract it from them. The advantage compounds: the more flow the company sees, the sharper its view of execution becomes, and the more value it can return, which in turn draws more flow. The result is a system designed to grow the pie rather than take a bigger slice.

“For onchain markets to win institutional capital at scale, the cost of liquidity in DeFi has to be at least as good as it is in traditional finance, and provably so. Too often it isn’t, because value leaks in execution with no standard to hold it to. Closing that gap takes excellence across many layers of execution, and it sits at the core of what we build,” said Kevin Farrelly, co-founder and CEO of Birdai Labs.

“As stablecoin and real-world-asset tokenization become a clear killer app for public blockchains, Birdai Labs is building critical infrastructure that will add trust and accelerate this market,” said Matt Walsh, a Founding Partner at Castle Island Ventures. “Kevin and Greg pair institutional market-structure fluency with base-layer engineering, and that combination is perfect founder-market fit.”

About Birdai Labs

Birdai Labs, Inc. is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2025. It operates at the base of the chain and builds infrastructure that measures, verifies, and improves onchain execution and returns value to the traders who create it. Learn more at birdai.xyz.

Media contact:  Birdai Labs • 415-539-5595 • 419566@email4pr.com

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SOURCE Birdai Labs

Partnering with Empower Community Care and its Brief Strategic Family Therapy program, New Jersey is delivering powerful, evidence-based therapy across all 21 counties through a statewide network of provider agencies.

ATLANTA, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The New Jersey Department of Children and Families (NJ DCF) Division of Family and Community Partnerships (FCP), in partnership with Empower Community Care, a leading global behavioral health and education organization that delivers evidence-based programs and tools, has successfully launched its Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT) program statewide. This family-centered prevention service is designed to strengthen family relationships, stabilize youth, and help families stay safely together. BSFT is one of several evidence-based models in Empower’s portfolio, and this rollout reflects its broader platform of training, consultation, and quality infrastructure Empower builds around each program it supports.

Supported through Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) funding, the initiative expanded BSFT across all 21 counties through six regional programs and established a statewide structure for training, consultation, data collection, and continuous quality improvement, so families can receive effective help earlier and avoid out-of-home placement.

The launch was marked by strong planning, high provider satisfaction, and disciplined execution, resulting in universal geographic access to BSFT and a sustainable infrastructure for ongoing delivery. Provider feedback reinforced the success of the rollout, with a provider survey routinely citing exceptional training quality and clarity, preparedness to implement, and overall training experience.

For BSFT leaders, the New Jersey work stands out as a model rollout for other states. New Jersey’s consistent follow-through, detailed planning, strong communication, and willingness to build leadership with provider agencies while maintaining accountability ensured remarkable success for the state.

“What really stands out about New Jersey is the level of communication and coordination,” said Debra Miller, BSFT Associate Director at Empower Community Care. “The partnership was thoughtful, highly responsive, and focused on making sure provider agencies had what they needed to implement BSFT well. We are proud to support New Jersey’s commitment to families by expanding access to evidence-based care that strengthens family relationships, reduces stress at home, and helps keep families safely together.”

“New Jersey’s rollout is exactly the kind of partnership we aim to build with every state we work with,” added Kortney Dale, Executive Director of Evidence-Based Programs at Empower Community Care. “It’s not just about delivering one program well; it’s about giving states the infrastructure to sustain effective, evidence-based care at scale. This launch shows what’s possible when a state invests in both the clinical model and the systems behind it, and we see it as a model for how Empower partners with states across our full continuum of programs.”

New Jersey paired thoughtful support from NJ DCF with an evaluation team from the start, a clear implementation strategy, manualized procedures, launch supports, regular meetings with NJ DCF, consultation teams, and a commitment to continuous quality improvement. That balance of structure and flexibility became a defining feature of the partnership, allowing the state to manage a brand-new statewide implementation while adapting to provider and family needs.

BSFT is an evidence-based, trauma-informed family therapy program that helps families strengthen relationships, improve parenting structure, address youth behavioral health and family instability concerns, and reduce the risk of out-of-home placement. Early feedback from New Jersey indicates that families are communicating more effectively, experiencing less stress, restoring caregiver leadership in the home, and building stronger family cohesion with BSFT.

“At the heart of this work is a simple goal: making sure families can get meaningful help before challenges become crises,” said Sanford Starr, Assistant Commissioner of FCP at NJ DCF. “The successful rollout of BSFT reflects the commitment of our provider network, the support of Empower and the BSFT team, and a shared belief that families do better when they can access timely and effective services. We are proud of what this initiative is already making possible for children and families across New Jersey.”

With statewide infrastructure now in place, New Jersey is positioned to move from launch to long-term sustainability. The next phase is expected to focus on continued evaluation, on-site supervisor and trainer development, and maintaining the cross-system partnership that helped make the rollout successful.

For more information about support and services for children and families in New Jersey, visit the New Jersey Department of Children and Families at www.nj.gov/dcf/. To learn more about Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT) and Empower’s continuum of evidence-based programs and solutions, visit us online at www.empowercommunitycare.com/bsft.

About Empower Community Care
Empower Community Care is a leading global behavioral health organization that delivers evidence-based programs, technologies, and tools to improve outcomes for youth, adults, families, and communities. Serving more than 2,000 agency and system customers, Empower works across all 50 U.S. states and over 35 countries, strengthening services for more than 3 million families worldwide and training over 23,000 professionals in evidence-based practices and growing. To learn more, visit EmpowerCommunityCare.com and follow Empower on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:

Caryn Tomer
VP, Marketing for Empower Community Care
618.579.9717
419677@email4pr.com 

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SOURCE Empower Community Care