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Visual Shop and Bluestreak Join Forces with Steelhead Technologies

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Together, the three industry leaders bring decades of metal finishing and heat treating expertise to one platform built for margin and growth.

CALUMET, Mich., Aug. 5, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Steelhead Technologies announced today the acquisitions of Visual Shop and Bluestreak, two longstanding providers of job shop management and QMS software. Customers of all three companies now have access to next-generation technology to help them get ahead: an all-in-one system built on a digital production floor, with automation and AI built in to power margin and growth.

“ThermTech is excited to announce our partnership with Steelhead Technologies as we implement their AI-powered heat treating platform.” – Mary Springer, Executive Vice President, ThermTech.

For years, Steelhead, Visual Shop, and Bluestreak have earned the trust of metal finishers and heat treaters across North America by delivering systems designed with the specific complexities job shops face in mind. Now these systems are joining forces. Customers are getting the best of each: the digital production floor, the industry knowledge, and the people who understand their business.

“Metal finishing job shops have been under decades of competitive pressure from offshoring, workforce challenges, and volatility in costs. With demographic changes and AI completely changing the operational landscape, the challenges remain as tall as ever. At the same time, top government officials and contractors are urgently bringing back work by reshoring and scaling production. Job shops must leverage technology to rapidly increase capacity and capability while not adding head count to solve every challenge. Steelhead is excited to be their technology partner providing purpose-built technology tailored for metal finishing, supercharged with AI and white-glove service from a knowledgeable team with decades of experience.”

— Jeff Halonen, CEO/Co-Founder, Steelhead Technologies

Continued Investment in Metal Finishing

Steelhead is accelerating its investment in metal finishing to position job shops for the next generation of manufacturing. The team is continuing to invest heavily in the industry, including its investment in FedRAMP to meet the security and documentation standards CMMC compliance requires, and dedicating engineering, support, and product resources specifically to fine-tune workflows. Customers will benefit from access to the people who know metal finishing and heat treating best, drawing on the long-standing experience at Visual Shop and Bluestreak.

“Visual Shop customers have always loved our vast array of features and our friendly and responsive support team that knows their business. To stay competitive in the long term, we would need to build a new product on a modern platform. Steelhead has a great product and shares our philosophy of providing outstanding customer service. As one company with Steelhead and Bluestreak, it’s a big win for customers because we can work together to bring the absolute best software experience to the metal finishing and heat treating industries.”

— Kevin Pluedeman, President of Cornerstone Systems (Visual Shop)

“For over 20 years, Bluestreak has powered heat treating and metal finishing job shops with software built to help them scale without compromising on quality. Looking ahead, we believe partnering with Steelhead positions us to deliver on that promise at an entirely new scale. By joining forces with Steelhead, we are bringing the institutional knowledge and specialized features of Bluestreak together with Steelhead’s modern infrastructure. Our focus remains entirely on supporting customers seamlessly today while building the ultimate, next-generation platform for the next 20 years.”

— Todd Wenzel, President and Founder of Bluestreak

“ThermTech is excited to announce our partnership with Steelhead Technologies as we implement their AI-powered heat treating platform. For decades, ThermTech has grown by investing in the things that matter most to our customers: our people, our equipment, our processes, and the quality systems that stand behind every part we treat. Over the last 23 years, we’ve leveraged and co-developed the Bluestreak QMS, and that investment in capability has been central to how we serve our customers. Moving to Steelhead is the next chapter of that same philosophy, a platform that unites MES, QMS, ERP, financials, and customer service in a single system. Our engineering team will work closely with Steelhead to shape highly specialized heat treating capabilities so we can continue raising the bar on quality, responsiveness, and the service our customers count on.”

— Mary Springer, Executive Vice President, ThermTech

Customer Perspective

At Exactatherm, a heat treater in Mississauga, ON, taking their shop floor digital has simplified training, tightened quality control, and enabled faster turnaround times.

“With Steelhead, if we need a job pulled for review in a Nadcap audit, we can look it up and have all the data right there. We don’t have to train someone with a background in metallurgy or heat treat to enter a job anymore; anyone can do it. That efficiency shows up everywhere: our lead times used to run a couple of weeks, now we’re down to ten days, and parts we used to store for ten to twelve days now move through in five to seven.”

— Vraj Shah, Quality Manager, Exactatherm

At Eastern Plating, a plating shop rebuilding and growing after a major flood, taking the shop floor digital has given the team real-time visibility into every stage of production.

“Before Steelhead we couldn’t see where our parts were at any given time. It was received, a traveler was put on it, and we didn’t know where it was again until it shipped. Now we know where our parts are any time once they’re in Steelhead, and probably 95% of the phone calls have been eliminated. As we’ve continued rebuilding from the flood, we’ve been able to increase our revenue by about 25 to 30%, and we were able to schedule all of that additional revenue with our existing head count.”

— Wayne Wheeler, Eastern Plating

Media Contact

Kelsey Halonen, Steelhead Technologies, 1 7346576859, kelsey@gosteelhead.com, gosteelhead.com

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Lumos Launches MCP Governance to Provide Agent Runtime Security

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Security and IT teams get visibility and control over MCP usage and agent tool calls, starting with Claude Code and Codex.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Lumos, the identity management platform for the agentic era, is releasing MCP Governance for Claude Code and Codex. MCP Governance checks an AI agent’s permissions at the moment it acts, and blocks the action if policy does not allow it.

Enterprises are rolling out AI coworkers faster than they can govern them. An agent inherits the permissions of the person who launched it, and then works at machine speed. A single employee might delete one Salesforce record by mistake, but their agent can delete a thousand in seconds.

“We spent twenty years learning to govern humans, and we still have not finished,” said Andrej Safundzic, CEO and co-founder of Lumos. “Now we have agents doing the same work ten times faster. Just here at Lumos, with fewer than 200 employees, we measured over 450,000 agent actions in a single week. That kind of scale is impossible to track with old methods.”

The industry has answered this problem with inventory, but registering every agent only tells a security team that an agent exists. It does not tell them what that agent can reach, and it does not tell them what it did.

Lumos is taking a different position. Permissions set the upper bound of what an agent is allowed to do. What the agent actually does happens at runtime, and until now identity teams have had no way to govern that moment. MCP Governance moves the decision to the point of action.

“The teams I talk to are not trying to slow AI down. They are trying to say yes,” said Safundzic. “One customer would not turn on an integration for their marketing team because too many people had access to the underlying tool. That decision cost them pipeline. Governance at the moment of action is how you turn that no into a yes.”

“Identity has always governed what someone is allowed to do,” said Leo Mehr, co-founder of Lumos. “It has never governed what they actually did, because humans move slowly enough that review after the fact was good enough. Agents changed that. By the time you review an agent’s activity, it has already made a few thousand decisions. The only place left to govern is the moment before the action runs.”

MCP Governance extends the work Lumos has already done on non-human identity. Lumos maps every identity and permission across human, machine, and AI identities. MCP Governance covers the other half of the problem, which is control over what those identities do.

MCP Governance is available today for teams running Claude Code and Codex, with support for more agents to follow.

Learn more about MCP Governance by scheduling a demo today.

About Lumos

Lumos is the first identity platform built around autonomous agents, not manual workflows. Security teams use Lumos to give every human, machine, and AI agent a living control layer that watches and governs access in real time. Traditional identity governance was built for human workflows and periodic reviews. AI makes the problem bigger, messier, and faster: more identities to protect, more permissions to govern, and less time to catch abuse. Lumos helps teams at companies like Mars, Netskope, Assurant, and GitLab move faster, reduce risk, and prove compliance, all while keeping humans in control.

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Ande Raises $52M Seed and Series A to Launch The First Entertainment Operating System For Enterprises

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Ande brings corporate entertainment into a single platform and gives venues a direct channel to enterprise bookings.

NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ande, the AI-native network for corporate entertainment, emerges from stealth with more than $52 million in seed and Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, and Sierra Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures.

Enterprises spend an estimated $325 billion a year on entertainment from client dinners and team outings to catering, sporting events, and gifting. Yet the booking and expense management behind it is fragmented across credit cards, AP systems, and consumer apps creating an extremely manual reconciliation process for finance teams.

Ande brings structure to one of the last unmanaged categories of enterprise spend by giving teams a single platform to book entertainment effortlessly, while finance and legal teams keep full visibility and control over every dollar spent.

Ande’s agentic workflows surface venue availability, book experiences, route approvals, execute contracts, and reconcile expenses automatically. Executive assistants, office managers, field marketers, GTM teams, and their managers all work together in a single, multiplayer workspace in order to book team offsites and deal-closing dinners, while the agents move each request through approval, signing, and payment.

More than 60 enterprises already run their entertainment on Ande, reporting savings of 12 to 15 percent. Customers like Cloudflare, Salesforce, McGraw Hill, Netskope, Navan, Sigma Computing, Monday.com, Workato, Semgrep, Checkout, Rillet, and many more contribute to over $400 million in entertainment spend flowing through the platform annually.

“Entertainment is one of the most important things a company does. It builds culture, closes deals and deepens the relationships that matter most. Yet the infrastructure to manage it is broken on both sides of every transaction,” said Lohit Sarma, CEO and co-founder of Ande.

“Ande is the first enterprise channel between corporate buyers and the world’s best entertainment vendors. Part of the reason this is such a hard problem to solve is that venues and entertainment providers don’t have a centralized distribution system to plug into. We had to build it. We’ve spent two and half years working with venues to digitize their data, and train models and agents for these workflows that are unique to enterprises,” continued Sarma.

For venues on the other side of the transaction, Ande is the corporate sales and marketing channel that never existed. Venues have historically had no pipeline into the corporate market. Ande gives them a platform to market to, engage with, and transact with corporate buyers at scale. Among the current partners are 1,600 hospitality venues including some of the largest and most decorated hospitality groups like Altamarea Group, Che Fico, Gracious Hospitality, JKS, The Mina Group, MML, Nobu, Riviera Dining Group, Tao Group Hospitality, Unapologetic Foods, Bacchus Management Group, Wish You Were Here, and Wolfgang Puck. Over 93,000 entertainment venues are on Ande’s network today.

“Our programs are high stakes and high visibility, with our executive leadership team and key customers at the core of each event we host,” said Vicky Chung, Director of Corporate Events at Netskope. “My team and I trust Ande’s platform, and especially the team behind it. I have real-time visibility into what’s happening across every event, and when I need something done right, I know it will be. My team is now focused on reaching the executives that matter and scaling the program vs. worrying about the logistics.”

“Entertainment is every enterprise’s biggest expense line that is not yet well managed. For that reason, there are financial inefficiencies and a poor experience,” notes Arif Janmohamed, Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Co-Founder of Duration Ventures. “Ande is the connective tissue, the perfect handshake between corporations and venues. Lohit is an exceptional founder, and the size of the market opportunity is largely unbounded.”

Redpoint Ventures Managing Director Alex Bard notes, “Particularly when we invest in an early-stage company, our confidence has everything to do with the founder and their ambition. Lohit has both startup DNA and the enterprise experience to solve this problem. His vision for Ande is bold and ambitious.”

About Ande

Ande is the AI-native network for corporate entertainment. Over 60 enterprises, including Cloudflare, Salesforce, and McGraw Hill already book, manage, and measure every experience through Ande, moving more than $400 million a year through a network of 93,000 entertainment providers across 90+ cities. For the vendors on the other side of the transaction, Ande is the dedicated corporate channel that’s never existed. Learn more at ande.ai.

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Ascensus Appoints John Shapiro as Chief Product Officer

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Experienced product leader to help strengthen client-centered innovation and advance the company’s next phase of growth

DRESHER, Pa., Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ascensus, the engine at the center of America’s savings ecosystem, today announced that John Shapiro has joined the company as Chief Product Officer and a member of the executive leadership team. Reporting directly to CEO Nick Good, Shapiro will shape Ascensus’ enterprise-wide product vision and strengthen how the company develops and delivers products, makes decisions, and sets priorities across the business.

As Ascensus continues to enhance the client experience and position the company for its next phase of growth, strong product leadership will play an increasingly important role in helping connect client insights, business priorities, and technology to create more integrated solutions and better outcomes. Shapiro will lead the Product organization and help foster unified, client-focused, and outcome-oriented approaches to product development across the enterprise.

“Ascensus has tremendous momentum, and we’re investing in the capabilities that will help drive our next phase of growth,” said Nick Good, CEO of Ascensus. “Delivering an exceptional client experience is central to that strategy. We want to make it easier for clients and partners to do business with us while creating more connected solutions and better outcomes. John brings a powerful combination of client focus, product leadership, and business acumen, and I’m excited about the impact he will have as we continue to grow and evolve.”

“Ascensus stands out for its clear purpose, talented team, and unique position in the market,” said John Shapiro. “I’m thrilled to join the company at such an important time and help build on its strong foundation by creating solutions and experiences that deliver greater value for clients, partners, and savers.”

Shapiro joins Ascensus from Lightspeed Commerce, where he served as Chief Product Officer. Earlier in his career, he held product leadership roles at Wayfair, Intuit, and Adobe Systems. Throughout his career, he has built and led large-scale product organizations, bringing new ideas to market and helping businesses serving millions of users accelerate growth.

Shapiro earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.

About Ascensus
Ascensus is the engine at the center of America’s savings ecosystem. The company makes saving easier by bringing together intuitive technology, AI, and high-touch service to support better financial outcomes for savers, small- to mid-sized businesses, state governments, and leading corporations and financial institutions. Ascensus offers comprehensive qualified and nonqualified retirement plan solutions, third-party retirement plan administration, 529 education and ABLE savings program administration, corporate- and bank-owned life insurance solutions, as well as fiduciary and total rewards services. The company supports over 16 million savers1 and oversees more than $1.3 trillion in assets under administration2 as of August 3, 2026. For more information, visit ascensus.com.

1 Figure includes American Trust Retirement recordkeeping participants
2 Figure includes AmericanTCS AUA

Contact:
Greg Winter, SVP of Communications, Ascensus
gregory.winter@ascensus.com

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SOURCE Ascensus

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