As antimicrobial resistance accelerates, when every hour can matter, faster diagnostics can help clinicians get patients on the right antibiotics sooner
Vivid Dx’s direct-from-blood platform uses light and AI to identify dangerous pathogens, aiming to move infectious disease care from broad-spectrum empiric therapy to targeted treatment
Keith O’Neill appointed as CEO to lead Vivid Dx through clinical validation and toward commercialization, drawing on 25 years of international experience advancing healthcare innovation

OXFORD, England, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Vivid Dx, a precision diagnostics company transforming pathogen detection and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) testing, today announced $15 million in seed financing co-led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Cedars-Sinai Intellectual Property Co., with participation from Jameel Investment Management Company and additional strategic investors. The company also announced the appointment of scientist and diagnostics executive Keith O’Neill as chief executive officer to lead its next phase of clinical and commercial development.

When a patient may have sepsis, every hour matters. Hospitals often have to wait days to learn which pathogen is causing the infection and which antibiotics are most likely to work. During that window, clinicians are forced to treat without complete information, often relying on broad-spectrum antibiotics that may not work against drug-resistant infections. This delay is a major public health issue: researchers estimate antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could contribute to 39 million deaths globally between 2025 and 2050. As hospitals face tighter antibiotic stewardship requirements and growing pressure to protect last-line therapies, faster diagnostics are becoming essential to giving patients the right treatment sooner while helping slow the spread of resistance.

Rapid infectious disease diagnostics have long faced a difficult challenge: hospitals need faster answers, but those answers also need to be accurate, broad enough to guide treatment, and practical for clinical workflows. Vivid Dx is addressing that challenge by applying AI/ML and advanced sample preparation to Raman spectroscopy, a validated technology with the capability to read biochemical signatures from individual pathogen cells. By combining direct-from-blood pathogen isolation, proprietary Raman spectral databases, and AI-powered signal interpretation, Vivid Dx’s platform is designed to identify pathogens and support phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) directly from blood, with the goal of reducing testing timelines from days to hours.

For hospitals, those earlier insights could help clinicians move from broad-spectrum empiric therapy to targeted treatment sooner, potentially reducing ICU stays, lowering treatment costs, and improving patient outcomes. Faster, more precise treatment decisions could also reduce unnecessary antibiotic exposure, an important factor in slowing the evolution of AMR.

“For decades, clinicians treating serious infections have had to wait too long for the information needed to guide antibiotic treatment. The biggest delay in today’s workflow happens before many diagnostic systems can even begin: clinicians are waiting for culture,” said Keith O’Neill, incoming chief executive officer of Vivid Dx. “Our goal is to move those answers closer to the moment a blood sample is taken. The company has built strong technical foundations, and my focus will be advancing that work through clinical validation and toward a platform that clinicians can adopt routinely to inform patient care decisions.”

O’Neill’s appointment brings Vivid Dx experience spanning scientific research, diagnostics development, global healthcare innovation, and company building. He worked at MIT on the Human Genome Project, built a multi-institution point-of-care diagnostics program, supported early-stage life sciences companies through Enterprise Ireland, and built global innovation alliances at Abbott. Most recently, he served as CEO of Novus Diagnostics, where he advanced the development of a rapid point-of-care test for bloodstream infections.

Vivid Dx is now preparing to test its platform with patient-derived clinical samples, a key step toward showing that the technology can perform in the kinds of complex cases hospitals see every day. To date, the company has achieved proof-of-concept across core platform components, including direct-from-blood pathogen isolation, high-purity bacterial recovery, AI-powered Raman signal enhancement, and development of a proprietary spectral database containing thousands of clinical isolates. In preclinical testing, the platform demonstrated approximately 99% pathogen identification accuracy, and roughly 92% concordance for phenotypic AST testing compared with gold-standard methods.

“Vivid Dx has built strong technical proof across the core platform and is now advancing toward clinical validation,” said Tony Besse, Principal, Health Tech at Oxford Science Enterprises. “The need for faster infectious disease testing is urgent, but speed alone is not enough—hospitals need results they can trust and integrate into care pathways. We look forward to supporting Vivid Dx as it takes the next step from technical proof toward the evidence needed for adoption at scale.”

“Over the next decade, it’s crucial that physicians globally adopt technologies that can help identify pathogens and guide therapy decisions faster and more precisely for drug-resistant infections,” said Nirdesh Gupta, Managing Director, Cedars-Sinai Technology Ventures at Cedars-Sinai. “We see significant potential in Vivid Dx’s approach combining blood-based testing and AI-driven analysis, and look forward to seeing the platform progress through clinical validation as it works to support faster, more informed infectious disease treatment decisions.”

About Vivid Dx
Vivid Dx is a precision diagnostics company developing rapid infectious disease testing to help hospitals identify dangerous pathogens and guide faster antibiotic decisions. The company has developed a direct-from-blood platform designed to use Raman spectroscopy and AI to detect infections and support phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing, with the goal of reducing diagnostic timelines from days to hours. Vivid Dx’s work is focused on improving treatment decisions for life-threatening infections such as sepsis while helping address the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Vivid Dx is backed by Oxford Science Enterprises, Cedars-Sinai, Jameel Investment Management Company, and additional strategic investors. Learn more at vivid-dx.com.

Media contact:
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SOURCE Vivid Dx

Summit gathers practitioners, contributors and engineers to advance open observability standards and practices

Key Highlights

CNCF announced the schedule for the inaugural Observability Summit Europe 2026, 5 October, in Prague, Czechia.The Summit program highlights practical approaches to metrics, logs and traces as organizations scale cloud native systems and adopt open observability standards.The event brings together developers, operators, site reliability engineers, platform teams and open source maintainers focused on building and operating cloud native observability systems.Registration is open now; early bird registration is € 150 through 31 July. Discounted registration is available for academics.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the schedule for the first Observability Summit Europe 2026, taking place in Prague, Czechia, on 5 October.

The summit features more than 25 technical sessions, bringing together developers, site reliability engineers and platform teams to address the operational demands of scaling cloud native systems. Curated by the steering committee for architectural sophistication and practical utility, the program focuses on core subject areas including automated synthetic monitoring, Observability as Code (OaC) and the evolution of observability through AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Sessions further address strategies for scaling distributed infrastructure, community-driven standard definition, and methods for embedding telemetry into DevOps pipelines.

“As cloud native systems grow more complex and AI workloads accelerate, observability has become fundamental to maintaining reliable production environments,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, CNCF. “Observability Summit Europe creates a dedicated space for the open source community to collaborate in person, advance open standards, and build the resilient technologies that modern infrastructure requires.”

Highlights of Observability Summit Europe 2026 include:

AI and MCP in Observability

AI and MCP are shifting how teams approach observability. Sessions in this track examine how open source tooling and emerging AI-powered workflows accelerate troubleshooting, automate operations and provide deeper insights into complex systems.

Highlight Session: Your Agent Did What? Forensic Observability for Systems That Don’t Leave Obvious Footprints – Adriana Villela, Dynatrace & Kasper Borg Nissen, Dash0

View the full AI and MCP in Observability track here.

CNCF Observability Projects

This track features the latest innovations across CNCF observability projects, including Cortex, Fluentd, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos and more. Attendees can expect technical deep-dives, production-ready use cases and contributor-led updates on integrations, best practices and real-world implementations.

Highlight Session: OpenTelemetry Beyond Observability: Security, CI/CD, and Network Management – Antoine Toulme, Cisco

View the full CNCF Observability Projects track here.

End-User Case Studies

Real-world implementations showcase how organizations successfully scale open source observability technologies. In this track, presenters will share practical architectures, deployment strategies, lessons learned and measurable business outcomes.

Highlight Session: Poisoning the Well: Security Lessons from Vulnerability Research in Telemetry Pipelines – Shuva Jyoti Kar, Palo Alto Networks & Aditi Gupta, JioHotstar (prev. Disney+ Hotstar)

View the full End-User Case Studies track here.

Registration
Observability Summit Europe 2026 will run as a CNCF-hosted event co-located with Open Source Summit Europe. Registration is open now, with general attendee pricing starting at €150 and academic tickets for full-time students or faculty at €85. The Dan Kohn scholarship program provides complimentary registration for community members from underrepresented groups. Applications are open through 23 August, 2026, at 11:59 PM PDT.

The event is supported by Diamond sponsor Odigos and Platinum sponsors OpenSearch Software Foundation and VictoriaMetrics.

Companies interested in sponsoring the Observability Summit Europe should submit a request to sponsor@cncf.io by 4 September. To learn more, view the sponsorship prospectus.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open-source software stack across public, private, and hybrid clouds. The CNCF hosts critical components of global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy, bringing together top developers, end users, and vendors. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world’s largest technology companies and over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, visit www.cncf.io.

Media Contact
pr@cncf.io 

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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Exaware, TeraHop and Infrawaves join as General Members, further accelerating global ecosystem momentum across AI Networking, enterprise and cloud data centers

Summary

The SONiC Foundation welcomes Supranett as a Premier Member and Exaware, TeraHop and Infrawaves as General Members, further expanding the global ecosystem advancing open networking for AI, enterprise and cloud infrastructure.The new members bring expertise in AI infrastructure, cloud networking and production deployments that will strengthen collaboration and accelerate innovation across the SONiC community.The continued growth of the SONiC ecosystem reflects increasing industry adoption of open, vendor-neutral networking as organizations build scalable, high-performance infrastructure for AI, cloud and enterprise environments.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation, an open source network operating system (NOS) hosted under the Linux Foundation, today announced that Supranett has joined the Foundation as a Premier Member. The Foundation also welcomed Exaware, TeraHop and Infrawaves as General Members, further expanding the global ecosystem advancing open networking across AI infrastructure, cloud, enterprise and telecommunications.

AI infrastructure is scaling rapidly and organizations are increasingly adopting open, interoperable networking platforms that can support large GPU clusters while providing flexibility across hardware vendors. SONiC has emerged as a leading open source NOS for AI and cloud environments, enabling organizations to build high-performance networks without vendor lock-in.

“As AI infrastructure becomes increasingly critical, open networking is essential to delivering the scale, performance and flexibility organizations need,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation. “We’re excited to welcome Supranett as a Premier Member alongside Exaware, TeraHop and Infrawaves. Their participation strengthens the SONiC community and accelerates innovation for the next generation of AI and cloud networking.”

As a Premier Member, Supranett will help shape the future direction of the SONiC ecosystem by contributing AI-optimized networking capabilities upstream and collaborating with the community on next-generation AI-native networking architectures. The company’s expertise in building large-scale AI infrastructure and production deployments will help advance SONiC’s capabilities for increasingly demanding AI workloads.

The addition of Exaware, TeraHop and Infrawaves as General Members further reflects growing global adoption of SONiC across production environments spanning hyperscale cloud providers, enterprises, telecommunications networks and AI data centers. Together, these organizations expand the Foundation’s technical expertise and reinforce industry momentum behind open, vendor-neutral networking.

Supporting Quotes
“At SUPRANETT, we believe the future of AI demands a network as open and dynamic as the models it powers. By joining the SONiC Foundation as a Premier Member, we are committing our technical expertise to build AI-native fabrics that unlock the full potential of next generation GPU architectures. Our goal is to ensure maximum efficiency and scalability for AI data centers worldwide.”
– Yue Gong, CEO, Supranett

“SONiC is an important open source-based building-block for DC/AI networking. We join the SONiC community to provide an end-to-end certified networking solution — hardware, software, support and a day-one working system on site. We’re glad to build that with the rest of the community.”
– Ronen Hovav, CEO, Exaware

About the SONiC Foundation
The SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation, supports the development and adoption of SONiC, an open source network operating system originally developed for hyperscale cloud environments. Today, SONiC powers production networks across cloud providers, enterprises, telecommunications providers, and AI infrastructure worldwide. Built on an open, vendor-neutral architecture, SONiC enables organizations to deploy and manage network infrastructure across multiple hardware platforms while avoiding vendor lock-in. Its growing ecosystem of contributors and member organizations continuously advances features, reliability, and scalability through open collaboration. To learn more about the SONiC Foundation and how to get involved, please visit https://sonicfoundation.dev.

Media Contact
The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.org 

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SOURCE SONiC