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Unit 221B Accelerates Product Strategy with Appointment of Cybersecurity Veteran Ben April as Chief Technology Officer

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Former Maltego CTO joins as Unit 221B expands its leadership team and advances the next phase of its cybercrime intelligence platform

NEW YORK, July 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Unit 221B, the cybercrime intelligence company helping enterprises, financial institutions, law enforcement, and government agencies understand, investigate and disrupt cybercriminal networks, today announced the appointment of Ben April as Chief Technology Officer.

April joins Unit 221B at a pivotal moment for the company. As cybercriminal organizations become increasingly global and sophisticated, demand for Unit 221B’s technology and expertise continues to expand across domestic and international markets.

As CTO, April will lead the company’s technology strategy, engineering organization, and product development. His appointment reflects Unit 221B’s next phase of growth as it expands its leadership team and accelerates product development. His new role also supports Unit 221B’s broader strategy to expand internationally and continue investing in AI and agentic capabilities that advance investigations.

“Over the past decade, we’ve built one of the industry’s deepest threat intelligence capabilities by working alongside enterprises, governments, and law enforcement to understand how fast cybercrime is evolving and changing,” said May Chen-Contino, CEO of Unit 221B. “Today, we’re at an inflection point where demand is accelerating faster than ever before. Ben has spent his career building and using technology that empowers investigators, making him the ideal leader to help us scale that expertise into the next generation of our platform.”

April joins Unit 221B after nearly four years as Chief Technology Officer at Maltego, where he led engineering through a period of significant product evolution, expanded data models, and developed new capabilities that helped investigators uncover complex relationships across digital investigations. Over the course of his professional life, he has built and scaled investigation technologies used by cybersecurity professionals and investigators worldwide.

“I’ve spent my career building technology that helps investigators uncover the truth. What drew me to Unit 221B was the opportunity to work alongside one of the industry’s most experienced threat intelligence teams and help scale that expertise through technology. By combining deep operational knowledge, proprietary intelligence, and ambitious product vision, we can build something together that fundamentally changes how organizations investigate and disrupt cybercriminals,” said Ben April.

Built on more than a decade of operational threat intelligence expertise, Unit 221B has turned fragmented digital evidence and high-signal criminal communications into actionable intelligence, helping investigators identify relationships between threat actors, accelerate investigations, and disrupt criminal activity.

April’s appointment will further Unit 221B’s broader strategy to expand internationally and continue investing in AI-enabled and agentic capabilities that advance investigations. By partnering intelligent automation with the company’s deep domain expertise that has differentiated it since its founding, Unit 221B aims to help customers dismantle cybercriminal networks at greater speed, efficiency, and scale and ultimately create a safer digital and physical world.

About Unit 221B

Unit 221B builds technology that stops cybercrime. Our flagship platform, eWitness, transforms billions of high-signal messages from criminal communications into actionable intelligence, enabling enterprises, law enforcement, and government agencies to detect, investigate, and disrupt threats at scale. Combined with an elite team of threat intelligence experts, ethical hackers, cybersecurity engineers, incident responders, and cyber attorneys, Unit 221B delivers technology-driven operations that dismantle criminal networks and produce measurable disruption. Unit 221B is backed by J2 Ventures and Pipeline Capital. For more information, visit https://www.unit221b.com/.

CONTACT: media@unit221b.com

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Yann LeCun, Bob Langer, Jens Nielsen and Fabian Theis Join Cellular Intelligence Scientific Advisory Board

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Turing Award Laureate, Moderna Co-Founder, BioInnovation Institute CEO and Helmholtz Munich Computational Health Director to Advise on Decoding the Logic that Governs How Cells Change and Carrying That Knowledge Into Medicine

BOSTON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cellular Intelligence, the AI company building a universal foundation model of cell signaling, today announced that Yann LeCun, Robert “Bob” Langer, Jens Nielsen and Fabian Theis have joined its Scientific Advisory Board. Langer joins the company’s Board of Directors as an observer.

Between them, the four hold a Turing Award, more than 1,500 patents, the founding of Moderna, the leadership of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute and Germany’s highest research honor. Their work and expertise tie directly to the key problems Cellular Intelligence was founded to solve: learning predictive models from complex systems, and turning that understanding into therapeutic applications.

“We are bringing together people who have changed what is possible in AI, biology and medicine to tackle a shared question: can we learn the rules that govern how cells change, and use that knowledge to help patients? Yann, Bob, Jens and Fabian bring the scientific imagination and rigor this challenge demands. Their perspectives will be invaluable as we connect predictive models to experiments and, ultimately, to therapeutic development,” said Micha Breakstone, Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Cellular Intelligence.

Yann LeCun received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational work in deep learning, founded Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab (FAIR) and served as the company’s Chief AI Scientist from 2013 to 2025. He is Executive Chairman of AMI Labs, the world-model company he co-founded, and Silver Professor at New York University. His research centers on AI systems that learn how the world works and predict what happens when they act on it.

“The models that interest me learn how the world works from data and predict what happens when we act on it. Living cells present an extraordinarily rich version of that challenge. What excites me about Cellular Intelligence is the combination of new methods for large-scale cellular data collection, new phenomenological and causal models of cellular dynamics trained from this data, and a team with the ambition to connect the two. The possibility of learning principles that transfer across biological contexts is especially compelling,” said Yann LeCun, Scientific Advisory Board member.

Robert “Bob” Langer is an Institute Professor at MIT, the institution’s highest faculty rank, and the most cited engineer in history. He holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents, and as a co-founder of Moderna and some 40 other companies, he has received the National Medal of Science, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for work that turned drug delivery and tissue engineering into medicines that reach patients.

“I have been deeply impressed by the team Cellular Intelligence has brought together. What draws me to this company is the opportunity to connect a fundamental understanding of cell behavior with the practical work of developing medicines. If we can better predict how cells respond to an intervention, we can ask more precise questions, design better experiments and open new possibilities for patients. I am excited to help the team pursue that potential,” said Robert “Bob” Langer, Scientific Advisory Board member and Board Observer.

Jens Nielsen is Chief Executive Officer of the BioInnovation Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s DKK 3 billion-plus engine for founding and scaling life-science companies in Copenhagen, and Professor of Systems Biology at Chalmers University of Technology. Author of more than 900 scientific publications and founder of several biotech companies, he was knighted by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 2019 and is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

“Understanding a cell means understanding how its many systems work together. Cellular Intelligence is bringing quantitative models and carefully designed experiments to that problem at an ambitious scale. I am excited by the opportunity to help turn that understanding into more predictable cell engineering and new therapeutic possibilities,” said Jens Nielsen, Scientific Advisory Board member.

Fabian Theis is Director of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, Scientific Director of Helmholtz AI and Professor of Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems at the Technical University of Munich. A co-founder of the Human Cell Atlas and a member of its Board of Directors, he received the 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany’s highest research honor, for machine-learning methods that predict how cells develop and respond to drugs, and is a member of the Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, and EMBO.

“Progress in modeling cells depends on the quality of the questions our data allow us to ask. What excites me about Cellular Intelligence is its ambition to build rich experimental data and predictive models together. That combination creates an opportunity to test how well models generalize across biological contexts and to learn systematically from where they fall short,” said Fabian Theis, Scientific Advisory Board member.

The appointments follow Arjun Raj’s arrival as Chief Scientific Officer and scientific co-founder, and the company’s acquisition of STEM-PD, an investigational Parkinson’s disease cell therapy with FDA Fast Track designation, from Novo Nordisk in May 2026. Manufacturing and clinical data from the program flow back into the company’s models. The company’s investors include Khosla Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Novo Nordisk.

About Cellular Intelligence

Cellular Intelligence is a clinical-stage AI company building a universal foundation model of cell signaling to understand, predict and ultimately control cellular behavior. Based in Boston, the company runs experimental biology, machine learning and therapeutic development as a single program, with regenerative medicine at its core. Learn more at www.cellularintelligence.com.

STEM-PD is an investigational therapy. Its safety and efficacy have not been established.

Media contact: Media-Relations@CellularIntelligence.com 

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SOURCE Cellular Intelligence

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Huawei Releases an AIFW Technical White Paper to Facilitate Firewall Upgrade

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SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On September 17 at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei released the Huawei AIFW Technical White Paper during the session themed “Solidifying Network Security Foundations to Safeguard Industrial Intelligence Implementation.” The White Paper systematically presents the architectural concept and key technologies of next-generation AI firewalls (AIFW) tailored for the AI era. Richard Wu, President of the Security Product Domain of Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, and Jeff Wang, President of Huawei Cyber Security & Privacy Dept, jointly attended the launch ceremony.

From Rule-Driven to Intent-Aware: Reshaping Security Defense Logic

As LLMs, AI agents, and compute clusters scale across industries, the cyber threat landscape is fundamentally shifting. Confronted with emerging risks like prompt injection, sensitive data leakage, and compute misuse, traditional rule-matching systems fall short due to delayed rule updates and limited semantic understanding.

According to the White Paper, AIFW integrates AI-native hardware, LLMs, and intelligence and security knowledge bases to shift defense focus from traffic protection to behavior governance. Leveraging full-spectrum awareness, semantic understanding, risk reasoning, and intent recognition, AIFW accurately pinpoints AI-specific risks such as DGA domains, prompt injection, and unauthorized content exfiltration. This marks a transition from rule-driven to intelligence-driven and from static policies to policy autonomy to protect AI computing centers, enterprise AI agents, and LLM operations.

AI-Native Hardware Foundation: Building Native Security Resilience with High Reliability

The White Paper details the AIFW’s native hardware architecture. Leveraging hardware-software synergy, performance across post-quantum cryptography, rule matching, and AI inference achieves order-of-magnitude improvements. Featuring 99.999% carrier-grade reliability, the product utilizes hardware decoupling, software isolation, and an engine-level root of trust to deliver robust survivability and rapid recovery. By preventing vulnerability exploitation and establishing native security immunity, it ensures uninterrupted core operations during extreme network attacks or failures.

Policy Autonomy and Intelligent Operations: Advancing Toward Human-Like Closed-Loop Defense

Addressing traditional security operation pain points—such as outdated rules, insufficient synergy, and complex management—AIFW achieves policy autonomy through unified security semantics and intelligent reasoning. The AIFW automatically identifies and remediates policy gaps and dynamically optimizes policies alongside service shifts. This establishes a human-like closed loop across awareness, decision-making, and response, significantly easing the operational burden on enterprises.

Moving forward, Huawei will continue collaborating with customers and partners to build an intelligent, efficient, autonomous, and trustworthy next-generation network security ecosystem.

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Willog Becomes First Korean Company Selected for Lloyd’s Lab Cohort 17, Gaining a Foothold in the Global Insurance Market

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Selected as 1 of just 10 companies out of 280 applicants worldwide, and the only Asian company in this cohortAt Lloyd’s, where the world’s insurance risk converges, alumni companies have generated more than $400 million in cumulative GWPWillog gains the opportunity to validate a diversified global revenue model spanning solution and data sales, insurance-linked commissions, and technology licensing fees

LONDON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Willog, an AIoT-based supply chain intelligence company co-led by CEOs Bae Seong-hun and Yoon Ji-hyun, announced that it has become the first Korean company selected for Cohort 17 of Lloyd’s Lab, the global insurtech innovation program run by Lloyd’s of London.

Willog is also the only Asia-based company in this cohort. The selection stands as a major milestone towards an entry into the global insurance market as well as a formal endorsement of Willog’s business model by a leading marketplace.

Named a Top European Startup Hub by the FT: Lloyd’s Lab, Where the World’s Insurance Innovators Converge

Lloyd’s Lab is an insurtech accelerator program that Lloyd’s established in 2018, and the Financial Times has named it one of Europe’s top startup hubs.

The program supports participating companies by providing direct support and collaboration from Lloyd’s underwriters and brokers to prepare insurance products ready for market, while not taking any equity. Program alumni have raised more than $1.4 billion in funding combined and generated $426 million in gross written premium (GWP).

Willog’s Logistics AIoT Data Fills a Gap in the Global Insurance Market

Logistics data-driven insurance products already exist in the market, but most rely on data supplied by carriers or third parties. By connecting proprietary data collected in the field by its own AIoT devices directly to insurance risk assessment and pricing, Willog makes the source of the data itself the basis for trust.

Willog’s approach of applying real-time cargo condition data to underwriting was recognized as a practical solution to a problem the Lloyd’s market has long struggled with: the lack of data infrastructure specific to logistics cargo.

Solution Revenue, Data Sales, Insurance-Linked Commissions, Technology Fees: A Foothold for Diversifying Willog’s Global Revenue Model

Willog Vision, the company’s integrated supply chain solution spanning everything from data logging to claims compensation, records data across the entire logistics process in real time and detects anomalies instantly. Therefore, dramatically lowering loss ratios, while the collected data also allows for insurance claims to cover whatever losses still occur.

During the program, Willog intends to secure insurance partners and prepare to launch a dedicated insurance product optimized for logistics with AIoT data.

Yoon Ji-hyun, Co-CEO of Willog, said, “The essence of this selection is that Lloyd’s has recognized the possibility that data from the logistics field can be translated into the language of insurance underwriting. This will be the starting point of a journey in which Willog’s logistics data becomes real infrastructure that transforms the global insurance market.

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SOURCE Willog

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