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Lianlian DigiTech Reports Strong H1 2026 Results: AI-Native + Globalization Strategy Accelerates Product Rollout and Adjusted Operating Profit More Than Doubled

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HONG KONG, Aug. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Lianlian DigiTech Co., Ltd. (HKEX: 2598) (“Lianlian DigiTech” or the “Company”), a leading AI-driven digital payment service provider headquartered in China with a global footprint, today reported interim results for the six months ended June 30, 2026. Following the announcement of its AI-Native + Globalization strategic upgrade during the period, the Company delivered growth across revenue, profitability, and product development, reflecting early execution of the new strategy. 

Results Highlights

Total Transaction Payment Volume (TPV) for global payments reached RMB 249.9 billion, up 25.9% year-over-year

Total revenue grew 11.9% year-over-year to RMB 875.6 million; global payment revenue reached RMB 600.9 million, and domestic payment revenue was RMB 106.0 million. Value-added services revenue increased 83.2% year-over-year to RMB 164.2 million

Gross profit reached RMB 454.4 million with a gross profit margin of 51.9%; global payment gross margin reached 70.8%

Adjusted operating profit increased 147.3% to RMB 156 million, excluding all non-operating items

Global regulatory footprint expanded to 68 payment licenses and qualifications, including new approvals in Canada and Dubai

Mr. Zhang Zhengyu, Chairman and CEO of Lianlian DigiTech, commented,

“In the first half of 2026, we made solid progress across all three growth pillars. We sharpened our focus on high-value customers and captured opportunities in global cross-border trade to sustain high-quality growth in our core business. Our AI-Native + Globalization strategy drove product delivery, with the launch of a series of AI products, alongside key breakthroughs in Agentic Payment that extended our services beyond payments. We also continued to expand our ecosystem and deepen our presence across the fintech and AI value chains. Guided by our mission, ‘Connecting the world, Empowering global commerce’, Lianlian remains committed to creating long-term, sustainable value for our customers and shareholders.”

Ms. Wen Yingse, CFO, Lianlian DigiTech, said,

“Despite a complex market environment, we delivered solid results in the first half of 2026 — both revenue and gross profit grew approximately 11.9% year-over-year, and adjusted operating profit more than doubled, reflecting continuous improvement in profitability and operating quality. We also continued to optimize our organizational structure and resource allocation, reducing our combined expense ratio from 60.3% to 51.9%, down 8.4 percentage points year-over-year. Looking ahead, we will continue to focus on core business growth, deepen the integration of AI in our business operations, capture economies of scale, and prudently expand ecosystem partnerships, strengthening our long-term, stable and sustainable competitive advantage in the global market.”

Global Payments

In its global payment business, Lianlian continued to expand its addressable market. On the product side, the Company accelerated the development of intelligent payment capabilities, embedding AI into operational processes to support enterprise efficiency and performance. The Company continued to focus on high-value enterprise clients going global and broaden its global payment services across B2B trade and service trade, expanding the range of cross-border business scenarios it supports. With a payment infrastructure spanning 68 licenses and qualifications across key international markets, including a newly obtained Canadian MSB license and a Dubai Category 3D payment license, Lianlian is well positioned to serve as a long-term operational partner for enterprises conducting business globally.

Domestic Payments and Value-Added Services

In the domestic payment sector, Lianlian maintained compliance with applicable regulatory requirements while making proactive adjustments to its resource allocation, deprioritizing lower-contributing transaction categories. The Company also strengthened the integration of its domestic capabilities with its global payment network, creating additional value for clients with cross-border operational requirements. Value-added services continued to grow as a significant revenue contributor in H1 2026. Lianlian continued to expand its payment service value chain and deepen the integration of payment capabilities across a range of commercial scenarios, driving demand for value-added services such as virtual bank cards, intelligent marketing, and other embedded financial services. As a result, segment revenue increased 83.2% year-over-year to RMB 164.2 million. The performance of this segment reflects the increasing integration of Lianlian’s payment capabilities into broader enterprise workflows, providing end-to-end support for companies in their international expansion and operational efficiency improvements.

AI-Native + Globalization Strategy Delivers Tangible Products

In H1 2026, Lianlian DigiTech translated its AI-Native + Globalization strategy into a series of concrete products and capabilities, delivering measurable outcomes for customers across its key business segments. Agent Wallet was launched as an intelligent payment infrastructure developed to address core payment requirements in the agent era, extending Lianlian’s capabilities beyond conventional payment processing. In addition, the launch of multiple AI products and enterprise-grade agent platforms further enhanced its intelligent service system. These developments were supported by deeper integrations with global network partners including Visa and UnionPay International, advancing agentic payment applications from technical validation to live deployment.

Capital Management and Shareholder Returns

Lianlian maintained a disciplined approach to capital management. Since initiating its share repurchase program in April 2025, Lianlian has repurchased approximately 40 million shares in total, returning more than HK$250 million to shareholders.

Outlook

Lianlian will continue to execute on its AI-Native + Globalization strategy, deepening its global footprint and strengthening competitive advantages built on trust, data and global payment network effects, and empowering Chinese enterprises for high-quality global expansion.

For more information, please refer to the 2026 interim results announcement:
https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2026/0820/2026082001339.pdf

–End–

About Lianlian DigiTech

Lianlian DigiTech Co., Ltd. (“Lianlian DigiTech” or “Lianlian”) was founded in 2009 and listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2024 (stock code: 2598.HK). As a leading AI-driven digital payment service provider headquartered in China with a global footprint, Lianlian adheres to its mission of “Connecting the world, Empowering global commerce” and pursues an “AI-Native + Globalization” strategy. Lianlian is committed to building a trusted global intelligent financial infrastructure, enabling seamless connectivity between Chinese enterprises and global businesses.

The Company’s core business comprises digital payment services and value-added services. Digital payment services encompass global and domestic payments and include a variety of products such as pay-in, pay-out, acquiring, foreign exchange, virtual bank card, and payment aggregation services. Value-added services focus on business and technology services that deeply integrate with payment scenarios.

As of June 30, 2026, the Company has established a global licensing portfolio comprising 68 payment licenses and related qualifications. As the only Chinese provider holding all state-level money transmitter licenses in the U.S., the Company’s regulatory leadership remains a core competitive advantage. Furthermore, its VATP license positions it at the forefront of digital currency and blockchain technology-based financial services. Lianlian supports services in more than 200 countries and regions, enables transaction settlement in over 140 currencies, and has served a cumulative total of over 13.3 million customers.

 

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SOURCE Lianlian DigiTech Co., Ltd.

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North Launches North v3 to Help Companies Manage and Optimize Cloud, AI, and Data Spend in One Platform

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North’s platform-wide v3 release adds Microsoft Azure, completing full coverage across all three major cloud providers, alongside a third-party integrations library, autonomous optimization, and a redesigned user experience.

NEW YORK, Aug. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — North.cloud today launched North v3, a platform-wide release that brings cloud, AI, and data spend into a single system. The release adds Microsoft Azure, completing North’s coverage across all three major hyperscalers. It also introduces native integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Snowflake, and an upgraded autonomous commitment management engine that purchases and adjusts cloud commitments automatically.

As companies expand across multiple cloud providers while adopting AI services and modern data platforms, managing infrastructure spend has become increasingly complex. Cloud, AI model, and data platform costs are now deeply intertwined, yet most teams still track them in separate tools.

North v3 expands North’s multi-cloud capabilities with the general availability of Microsoft Azure, joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to support all three major hyperscale cloud providers. Azure is available following a successful beta program with early customers. Native integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Snowflake are now live in North’s growing integrations library, bringing AI and data platform spend into the same system as cloud infrastructure. These integrations establish the foundation for broader optimization capabilities across modern infrastructure as North continues to expand support for additional platforms.

North v3 also introduces Autobot, an autonomous commitment management engine powered by Noros, North’s AI FinOps copilot, that models usage daily and automatically purchases and renews cloud commitments across every provider. Using machine learning to evaluate usage patterns, renewal windows, and projected demand, Autobot balances a mix of one- and three-year commitments and automatically purchases, renews, scales, or reduces customer-owned commitments as infrastructure needs evolve.

“The infrastructure our customers manage today looks very different than it did even a few years ago,” said Matt Biringer, CEO of North. “Cloud spend no longer stops at compute and storage. It includes AI models, data platforms, GPUs, and multiple cloud providers. North v3 reflects that shift by bringing those systems together in one place and automating more of the work required to manage them.”

North v3 also includes:

Generative dashboards in beta that allow users to build dashboards and surface insights using natural language within Noros AI, North’s FinOps LLMA redesigned commitment management experience, including more granular visibility, interactive simulations, and planning tools that help teams evaluate different savings strategies before making purchasing decisionsA redesigned user experience with simplified navigation and an updated interface for engineering and finance teamsA cross-cloud usage optimization feature, Rightsize, now extends to GCP alongside AWS, with plans to expand to additional cloud providersTokenFlow, a feature for governing token usage, spend, budgeting, and model health, available in early betaA refreshed brand experience, including an updated website and visual identity

Availability

North v3 is available beginning August 20, 2026, with additional integrations and capabilities planned in future releases.

About North

North.cloud is the financial operating system for cloud, AI, and data. The platform helps companies understand, optimize, and automate spending across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, AI platforms, and modern data infrastructure. North is approaching $2 billion in managed cloud spend and has helped customers save more than $400 million through intelligent optimization and automation.

Media Contact

Sara Gharnit
VP of Marketing
North
press@north.cloud 
516-508-8611

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SOURCE North.Cloud

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Redpanda Continues Strong Momentum, Reports Record Q2 Performance

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As Enterprises Scale AI Agent Deployments Across Data and AI Workloads, Growing Infrastructure Demand Fuels Redpanda’s Record Performance

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Redpanda, the leading provider of mission-critical data and agent governance infrastructure, today announced record second quarter fiscal 2027 results, with new ARR growing more than 100% year over year on strong new customer growth and expanded adoption among existing customers. The company’s growth is fueled by increased global demand for infrastructure that supports mission critical real-time data and AI workloads across the enterprise.

Redpanda is a leading AI and data platform built to handle the real-time data that moves markets, settles trades, and powers global manufacturing. Hundreds of organizations, including Global 2000 enterprises, already trust Redpanda with their mission critical data and AI workloads. Now, as agents begin acting on that data, Redpanda provides the governance enterprises require in order to see and control what agents can access and do, and to enforce policy across agents, data, and systems.

“The next phase of AI is not about building better models. It’s about connecting those models to the private data and systems that run the enterprise, while maintaining control over the data that matters most,” said Alex Gallego, CEO and Co-founder, Redpanda. “The infrastructure that was built for applications was designed for humans, not machines. Agents can make decisions, take actions, work across domains, and generate code on the fly and often inherit permissions far greater than what they need. Agents need real-time data, governance, and control across models and systems. That’s the layer Redpanda provides, and it’s becoming fundamental to how enterprises put AI into production.”

Financial highlights and company momentum:

Grew new ARR more than 100% year-over-yearClosed a record number of expansion deals, driven by enterprises making Redpanda strategic to their data and agentic workloadsLaunched Redpanda Frontier, a new partner program already spanning 30 partners across 14 countries. Partners are helping customers use Redpanda across their data and AI initiatives, accelerating the path from technology investment to business outcome.Opened a new R&D office in Warsaw, Poland, adding engineering capacity to keep pace with customer demand as more of the world’s most consequential companies run their mission-critical data and AI workloads on Redpanda

Product highlights:

Expanded the capabilities of the industry-first agentic governance platform for AI agents, introducing an industry first Out-of-Band Policy Engine (OBPE) that enforces data and action policies at the MCP boundary, where agents cannot read, modify, or circumvent those policies, alongside a live network graph of every agent, model, and tool in the enterpriseExtended Redpanda SQL, the PostgreSQL API-compatible analytical engine purpose-built for agentic governance, to general availability on Google Cloud in addition to AWS, deployed inside customers’ own cloud accounts so agent transcripts never leave their networkAdded additional performance results for real-time analytics, demonstrating consistent query latency across a 10x increase in data volume and a 7x speedup on heavy analytical queries when scaling from one node to eightAdded additional data integration capabilities to a platform with 300+ connectors used by companies moving billions of events a day, including a visual pipeline composer, SAP HANA and BigQuery Write API connectors, and full CDC semantics in the Iceberg output

Industry accolades and awards:

Featured in NVIDIA’s data processing ecosystem for agentic AI, alongside AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, Dell, and HPENamed a Leader in the ISG Real-Time Data Emerging Providers Buyers Guide 2026

The shift from AI experimentation to production is creating a new infrastructure requirement. Agents need real-time access to enterprise data to act, while companies need visibility and control over what agents can access and do across systems and models. Open source has made AI easier to build and frontier AI labs provide the models, but neither solves the infrastructure challenge of connecting those models to private enterprise data and governing their actions. Redpanda brings together real-time data, governance, and control across models, giving enterprises the infrastructure to put agents to work at scale—without giving up control.

About Redpanda
Redpanda builds the data infrastructure that many businesses already run on, and because your agents need the same governed, real-time access to that data as your applications do, it is also the platform that connects, governs, and audits your agents. It’s all built on a battle-tested data platform that unifies data streaming, intelligent connectivity, and SQL analytics into a single system, delivering high throughput at low latency and unmatched value. Available as Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), self-managed, or fully managed cloud, Redpanda is trusted by hundreds of organizations, including Global 2000 enterprises across industries, and a thriving global community of tens of thousands of developers. Learn more: redpanda.com

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SOURCE Redpanda

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Shield AI’s X-BAT named official autonomous aircraft of the Army-Navy Game

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RENO, Nev., Aug. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced its X-BAT has been named the Official Autonomous Aircraft of the Army-Navy Game presented by USAA, one of the most storied rivalries in American sports. Shield AI also joins as an Associate Sponsor of America’s Game. The 127th meeting of the United States Military Academy at West Point’s Army Black Knights and the United States Naval Academy’s Navy Midshipmen will take place Dec. 12, 2026, at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

X-BAT will serve as Shield AI’s flagship aircraft for the sponsorship. X-BAT is an AI-piloted, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fighter jet designed for expeditionary and maritime operations in contested environments, powered by Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software. It combines VTOL with a range of more than 2,000 nautical miles at full mission payload, letting it operate from ships, remote islands, or austere sites with no runway required.

“There’s no game like Army-Navy,” said Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s president, co-founder and Naval Academy Class of 2008 graduate. “I started Shield AI because I deeply believed in the mission of our Armed Forces and that technology could be better leveraged to help accomplish that mission. With 15% of our workforce made up of veterans and dozens of service academy graduates on our team, supporting this game and Army and Navy athletics is a natural extension of who we are. Being part of America’s Game is an honor.”

“Shield AI’s support with X-BAT as the Official Autonomous Aircraft of the game highlights the growing role that advanced technology plays in keeping our future forces safe. As future Army and Navy leaders take the field for the 127th meeting of this historic rivalry, we’re excited to welcome a partner whose mission is to equip tomorrow’s warfighters with the capabilities they’ll need to succeed,” said Tom Theodorakis, Director of Athletics at Army West Point.

“We are proud to welcome Shield AI and X-BAT to America’s Game. Founded by one of our own, Shield AI embodies the exact same values the Army-Navy Game has celebrated for generations. This partnership brings together organizations united by a shared mission to support those who defend our nation, and we look forward to celebrating the next generation of military leaders who will carry that mission forward,” said Michael Kelly, Director of Athletics at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Shield AI joins presenting sponsor USAA, participating partners Chevrolet, Exchange, Duke Cannon Supply Co. and Palantir, and associate sponsor The American Legion in supporting Army-Navy. Shield AI will have a prominent presence throughout Army-Navy Game week, with additional fan experiences and programming to be announced ahead of kickoff. The announcement comes as Shield AI sponsors Tailhook’s Hook ’26, the naval aviation symposium held annually in Reno.

About Shield AI

Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedInXInstagram, and YouTube

Media Contact: Lily Hinz; media@shield.ai

About the Army-Navy Game

The Army-Navy Game presented by USAA is an annual football game between the nation’s two oldest service academies. The event dates back to 1890 and is executed jointly by the Army West Point Athletic Association and the Naval Academy Athletic Association. The 2026 Army-Navy Game will be televised on CBS on Saturday, Dec. 12 at 3 pm ET and broadcast nationally on Westwood One Radio. America’s Game is the greatest rivalry in all of sports. The Army-Navy Game has an in-house sponsorship model represented exclusively by Army West Point Athletics and Navy Athletics. Learn more at ArmyNavyGame.com.

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SOURCE Shield AI

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