Known as the “Pulitzer of Education Innovation,” the Yass Prize has recognized Valor for its commitment to a sustainable, transformational, outstanding, and permissionless approach to educating the whole person.

AUSTIN, TEXAS, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Valor Education has been named a Contender for the 2026 Yass Prize, joining a cohort of 26 organizations vying for the $1 million grand prize, which would enable Valor to complete its growth in Central Texas and begin expansion to new regions.

Valor and the other Contenders will advance to the Yass Prize Accelerator, which includes significant time spent with recognized leaders in business, education, entrepreneurship, and public policy, who will offer their experience in strengthening and scaling organizations. The Accelerator culminates in a pitch competition before a distinguished panel of judges, who will award the $1 million prize, with the winner to be announced on October 6th at the Power of Innovation Summit in Philadelphia.

“When my husband Jeff and I founded the Yass Prize in 2021, our goal was to recognize the education innovators who refused to let students fall behind,” said Yass Prize co-founder Janine Yass. “Five years later, this remarkable 2026 cohort shows how far that movement has grown – creating student-centered solutions for every kind of learner while expanding opportunities for families across America.”

Valor is one of the nation’s largest organizations providing a tuition-free, classical, and whole-person education. With five schools and 5,000 students in Central Texas, Valor has grown significantly since launching its first school in 2018. With an additional 5,500 students on the waitlist, Valor is seeking to expand its existing campuses and open schools in new regions to serve the many children and families seeking a fully human education.

“An outstanding school is much more than a strong curriculum or a fancy building,” said Stephen Gordon, Valor’s Superintendent of Schools. “At Valor, we cultivate a community rooted in wonder, humility, kindness, and friendship. This culture is fostered by our faculty and is communicated to our students through a shared way of life, a capacious curriculum, and a spirit of genuine inquiry.”

Valor’s educational model is rooted in the formation of the whole person. Its K–12 charter schools are intentionally low-tech, high-presence environments. Across all grade levels, students discuss great literature, delight in the fine arts, recite poetry, explore nature and the created world, and learn alongside teachers who personally know them. Valor’s first principle is the affirmation of the intrinsic dignity of each human person, and its faculty frequently remind students: “It is good that you exist.” Students experience an integrated education that includes mentorship programs, formation days, thematic assemblies, festivals, retreats, symposia, poetry battles, and backpacking trips.

Valor’s success emerges from its approach to faculty formation and culture. Believing that students cannot flourish without excellent teachers who witness to a good life, Valor provides a significant program of faculty formation. Every teacher, leader, and staff member across all five campuses takes part in coaching, twice monthly seminars on great texts, academic retreats, and symposia. Many faculty arrive from prestigious liberal arts colleges such as the University of Dallas, Hillsdale College, Franciscan University, and St. John’s College, drawn by a calling to work in a community of friends and teach children. The work is anchored by the Valor Institute for Studies in Person and Community, which collaborates with university professors from across the country to respond to reductive and utilitarian views of the human person, community, and the created world. At a time when teacher burnout is reshaping the profession, 92 percent of Valor faculty say their school is following its mission — and a growing number of Valor parents, having seen the culture from the inside, have joined the faculty themselves.

“A school cannot give its students what its teachers do not already possess,” said Mr. Gordon. “That is why we form our faculty first. Our teachers read the same great books, engage the same questions, and delight in the same beautiful things we hope our students will come to love. We know that for the children in our classrooms, the teacher is the lesson.”

The results of this approach show up in every facet of the school. Students stay: retention approaches 90 percent across all schools. Families give: more than half of Valor families voluntarily donate each year to schools that charge no tuition, and parent satisfaction has topped 90 percent in every year of Valor’s existence. And students learn: on state end-of-course exams, Valor students scored 28 points above the Texas average in English I, 32 points above in English II, and 18 points above in Biology, while high school students averaged 1,122 on the SAT — 93 points above the national mean. Valor achieves this with a single-track Great Books curriculum that offers no gifted-and-talented courses and no remedial courses, outperforming state averages in every demographic group Texas tracks. Valor prepares students for a full human life — not only college and career readiness, but also a sense of vocation, a love of beauty, and a humble desire for wisdom and virtue.

Valor’s school communities began in places others had cast aside — including a former ice-skating rink, a defunct daycare, a closed Catholic school, an office park, and a rural community. With enrollment at its Central Texas schools nearing capacity, the Yass Prize would enable Valor to complete construction projects at its current schools and begin expansion to a new region, part of its plan to bring Valor’s total enrollment to 10,000 in the next ten years.

“This prize would accelerate work that is already underway,” said Mr. Gordon. “Families in Austin, San Antonio, and other cities across Texas and the United States are asking for a Valor school, and we are excited to bring this transformative education to thousands more children.”

About Valor Education
Valor Education exists to educate the whole person in authentic communities for a full human life and is committed to providing high-quality, tuition-free classical education to all students, regardless of background or ability. Through its K–12 charter schools and the Valor Institute for Studies in Person and Community, Valor builds communities dedicated to wisdom, virtue, and friendship. Valor serves 5,000 students in the Austin and San Antonio metro areas with a waitlist of more than 5,500 children.

Media Contact:
Name: Rachel Pruski
Title: Marketing and Communications Coordinator, Valor Education
Email: rpruski@valoreducation.org 
Phone: (512) 569-0784
Website: valoreducation.org

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SOURCE Valor Education

Seattle studio joins the OpenAI Partner Network to help startups and B2B SaaS companies take frontier models from prototype to production

SEATTLE, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Techlusion, an AI-Native Product Engineering Studio, today announced it has been named an OpenAI Select Partner within the OpenAI Partner Network.

The OpenAI Partner Network is a global program for partners to build, sell, and deliver AI solutions with OpenAI. It brings together partners with deep industry expertise, delivery capabilities, and customer relationships while equipping them with resources, enablement, and support to help enterprises adopt OpenAI frontier models and products and turn them into measurable impact.

As an OpenAI Select Partner, Techlusion will continue working with OpenAI to help organizations build, deploy, and scale AI solutions responsibly and effectively. This work will help organizations get more useful work from every token and stronger performance per dollar with GPT‑5.6, while using ChatGPT Work to turn ambitious goals into finished work. Techlusion brings that capability to the verticals where it ships most – telehealth and HealthTech platforms, pharma, financial services, and B2B SaaS – with every engagement architecturally led by founder Khelan Patel, previously a senior engineer at AWS, Oracle, and IBM.

“We’ve been building on OpenAI models in production systems since our founding in 2022 – agentic workflows, enterprise readiness, AI products that businesses run on every day,” said Khelan Patel, Founder & CTO, Techlusion. “Being named an OpenAI Select Partner formalizes how we already work: senior engineers taking frontier models from demo to deployed products that deliver measurable results. With GPT‑5.6 and ChatGPT Work, we help clients turn AI initiatives into shipped systems that move conversion, retention, and delivery speed.”

Techlusion supports organizations across HealthTech, telehealth, pharma, financial services, eCommerce, and B2B SaaS – primarily in the United States – with AI development, custom software engineering, cloud consulting, and embedded CTO-level product leadership. Its work includes 50+ production applications between startups and enterprises.

Looking ahead, Techlusion plans to expand its GenAI and agentic AI offerings built on OpenAI models, invest in enablement across its 30+ person senior engineering team, and scale production deployments with HealthTech and SaaS customers – helping organizations translate AI ambition into measurable business outcomes.

Learn more about the OpenAI Partner Network: https://openai.com/business/partners/

About Techlusion

Techlusion is an AI-Native Product Engineering Studio headquartered in the Seattle area, delivering with senior engineering teams across US and India time zones. Founded in 2022 by Khelan Patel – previously a senior engineer at AWS, Oracle, and IBM – the studio has shipped 50+ applications in HealthTech, pharma, financial services, eCommerce, and SaaS, and holds a 5.0 client rating on Clutch. Learn more at techlusion.io.

Media contact:

Khelan Patel
khelanp@techlusion.io

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NEW YORK, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — WhiteFiber, Inc. (Nasdaq: WYFI) (“WhiteFiber” or the “Company”), a provider of artificial intelligence (“AI”) infrastructure and high-performance computing (“HPC”) solutions, today announced the closing of its previously announced upsized private placement (the “offering”) of $310.0 million principal amount of 5.00% Convertible Senior Notes due 2032 (the “notes”), including the exercise in full of the initial purchasers’ option to purchase up to an additional $40.0 million principal amount of notes.

The notes were issued with an initial conversion price of approximately $33.84 per share, representing a premium of approximately 25% over the last reported sale price of the Company’s ordinary shares on the Nasdaq Capital Market on August 18, 2026.

The Company received net proceeds from the offering of the notes of approximately $298.5 million, after deducting the initial purchasers’ discounts and its estimated offering expenses. The Company used approximately $118.5 million of the net proceeds from the offering to pay the cash consideration for the concurrent note exchange transactions, as described below. The remaining net proceeds from the offering are expected to be used primarily for data center expansion, including to partially fund the lease or purchase of additional property or properties on which to build additional WhiteFiber data centers, to construct those facilities, to enter into additional energy service agreements for each additional site, to purchase related equipment (including GPU servers to support WhiteFiber’s cloud business), and for potential acquisitions, partnerships and joint ventures related thereto, and for working capital and general corporate purposes.

Concurrently with the pricing of the offering, the Company entered into privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of its 4.500% Convertible Senior Notes due 2031 (the “existing notes”). Pursuant to those transactions, the Company exchanged $198.15 million in aggregate principal amount of the existing notes for an aggregate cash amount of approximately $118.5 million (including accrued and unpaid interest) and approximately 6.3 million ordinary shares, resulting in the aggregate principal amount of the existing notes outstanding being reduced to approximately $31.85 million.

Sam Tabar, Chief Executive Officer of WhiteFiber, commented:

“Completing this transaction now materially enhances our liquidity and provides greater capital certainty as we complete the first phase of NC-1 and prepare for the next phase of WhiteFiber’s colocation growth,” said Sam Tabar, Chief Executive Officer of WhiteFiber. “Together with the anticipated closing of our proposed project-level financing for NC-1, which remains subject to the completion of definitive documentation and satisfaction of customary approvals and closing conditions, we expect to be positioned to initiate site preparation and place long-lead equipment orders on the timetable required to support our target of bringing more than 100 MW of additional capacity online across our development pipeline in 2027. Advancing site readiness and procurement now is intended to reduce schedule risk and position WhiteFiber to execute long-term leases with high-quality customers for that capacity during the fourth quarter of 2026. This represents the next step in our strategy of converting our development pipeline into contracted, financeable capacity and reinvesting capital to scale the platform.”

The notes were offered only to persons reasonably believed to be qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act. The offer and the sale of the notes and the ordinary shares of the Company issuable upon conversion of the notes or in connection with the note exchange transactions, have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, any state securities laws or the securities laws of any other jurisdiction, and, unless so registered, may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act and other applicable securities laws.

This press release is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy any of these securities nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification thereof under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. 

About WhiteFiber, Inc.

WhiteFiber is a provider of AI infrastructure solutions. WhiteFiber owns HPC data centers and provides cloud services to customers. Our vertically integrated model combines specialized colocation, hosting, and cloud services engineered to maximize performance, efficiency, and margin for generative AI workloads.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this press release about future expectations, plans, and prospects, as well as any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words “anticipate,” “look forward to,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “target,” “will,” “would” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Such forward-looking statements include, among others, statements relating to WhiteFiber’s expectations regarding the expected use of proceeds from the notes offering.

Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including risks and uncertainties associated with market conditions, as well as discussions of potential risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed in the section entitled “Risk Factors” in WhiteFiber’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, as well as those discussed in WhiteFiber’s subsequent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. By their nature, forward-looking statements are not statements of historical fact or guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions or changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict or quantify. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, they do involve assumptions, risks and uncertainties, and these expectations may prove to be incorrect. Investing in our securities involves a high degree of risk. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as there are important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements, many of which are beyond WhiteFiber’s control. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof. WhiteFiber specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether due to new information, future events, or otherwise. Readers should not rely upon the information on this page as current or accurate after its publication date.

Contacts for WhiteFiber
Investor Contact: IR@whitefiber.com

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SOURCE WhiteFiber, Inc.