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NEO Battery Secures CAD 392K Purchase Order from Fortune 500 Automotive OEM & Receives UN Certification

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Secured CAD 392K purchase order contract from North American Fortune 500 automotive OEM customerOne of largest foundry contracts awarded to date following months of manufacturing and qualitative validation through past and existing projectsReceived UN 38.3 certification for 11.5Ah drone battery product to enable international shipping to U.S., Ukraine, Canada & EuropeIncreased volume of customer pipeline in various downstream verticals along with proprietary chemistries including 100% silicon, lithium-metal, and sodium-ion batteries

TORONTO, Sept. 17, 2026 /CNW/ — NEO Battery Materials Ltd. (“NEO” or the “Company”) (TSXV: NBM) (OTC: NBMFF), a low-cost, silicon-enhanced battery manufacturer enabling high-performance capabilities for drones, robotics, and physical AI, is pleased to announce that it has secured a purchase order agreement valued at approximately $392,000 CAD ($280,000 USD) from its existing North American Fortune 500 automotive OEM customer (the “Customer”). The order represents one of the largest contracts awarded to date within NEO’s foundry manufacturing portfolio.

The purchase order follows several months of validation of NEO’s battery manufacturing quality, operational efficiency, and cost competitiveness through past and existing projects undertaken with the Customer. Under its foundry model for automotive applications, NEO produces full battery cells according to customer-defined specifications and resolves process bottlenecks in advanced development projects for next-generation electric vehicle models. From small-scale evaluation to this purchase order contract, the progress attests to the Company’s engineering and production capabilities, and NEO will continue to collaborate on larger-volume orders/projects with the Customer.

Within the drone and defense portfolio, NEO has received UN 38.3 certification for its 11.5Ah cell product following the Korea Certification under the KC 62133-2 standard. UN 38.3 is a mandatory safety certification to enable shipping lithium-ion batteries by air, sea, and land across most jurisdictions. With the certification in place, NEO has established schedules to actively ship the 11.5Ah product internationally for sampling and commercial validation with drone, defense, and aerospace customers in the United States, Ukraine, Canada, and Europe.

“NEO is steadily yet successfully proving out our foundry capability with tier-1 customers and expanding manufacturing capacity at the 2nd cell assembly facility to accommodate contract manufacturing demand in the subsequent years,” expressed Mr. S.J. Youn, Head of Manufacturing & Facility Operations of NEO. “Due to our flexible manufacturing model, we have increased the volume of our customer pipeline to service various downstream applications and chemistries that include 100% silicon, lithium-metal, and sodium-ion batteries. With our defense drone portfolio, we aim to receive more UN certifications for different battery models and aggressively manufacture products with the main objective of converting sample evaluation to larger-magnitude, long-term orders.”

About NEO Battery Materials Ltd.
NEO Battery Materials is a Canadian-South Korean battery technology company focused on developing and producing silicon-enhanced lithium-ion batteries in drones, robotics, physical AI, electric vehicles, and energy storage systems. With a patent-protected, low-cost silicon manufacturing process, NEO Battery enables longer-running and ultra-fast charging properties and provides end-to-end battery solutions from materials selection, cell architecture, and process optimization. The Company aims to be a globally-leading producer of high-performance lithium-ion batteries and materials, building a secure, robust battery supply chain for Western manufacturers. For more information, please visit the Company’s website at: https://www.neobatterymaterials.com/.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors
Spencer Huh
Director, President, and CEO

This news release includes certain forward-looking statements as well as management’s objectives, strategies, beliefs and intentions. All information contained herein that is not clearly historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. Generally, such forward-looking information can be identified notably by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “plans”, “expects” or “does not expect”, “is expected”, “budget”, “scheduled”, “estimates”, “forecasts”, “intends”, “anticipates” or “does not anticipate”, or “believes”, or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results “may”, “could”, “would”, “might” or “will be taken”, “occur” or “be achieved”. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to: volatile stock prices; the general global markets and economic conditions; the possibility of write-downs and impairments; the risk associated with the research and development of battery-related technologies; the risk associated with the effectiveness and feasibility of battery material, electrode, and cell technologies that have not yet been tested or proven on commercial scale or under real-world operating conditions; the risks associated with battery-related manufacturing process scale-up, including maintaining consistent material, component, and cell quality, production yields, and process reproducibility at a pilot, semi-commercial, or commercial scale; the risks associated with compatibility of existing battery chemistries, formulations, components, or designs; unforeseen risks associated with entering into and maintaining collaborations, joint ventures, partnerships, or commercial contracts with battery cell manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers, and various companies in the global battery and downstream end-user supply chain; the risks associated with the failure to develop and produce commercially viable battery-related products or that technical goals may not be achieved within expected timelines or budgets under a joint development or collaboration; the risks associated with the Company’s technologies and products not meeting performance requirements or customer specifications; the risks that prototype and pilot-scale products do not advance into commercially produced products or translate into commercial orders; the risk associated with battery components and cell purchase orders and offtake supply that may not be fulfilled in full, on time, or at all as actual revenue realization depends on delivery schedules, achievement of technical milestones, and customer acceptance and validation; the risk associated with losing official vendor registration or status with existing customers; counterparty risk upon delivery of prototype and commercial products; the risks associated with constructing, completing, securing, and financing pilot, semi-commercial, and commercial battery materials, components, and cell manufacturing facilities including the Canadian and South Korean facilities; the risks associated with potential delays or increased costs with site preparation, equipment procurement and installation, and facility commissioning; the risks associated with integrating silicon anode material production, electrode manufacturing, and cell assembly within a single operational cluster or the Company’s business portfolio; the risks associated with supply chain disruptions or cost fluctuations in raw materials, processing chemicals, and additive prices, impacting production costs and commercial viability; the risks associated with uninsurable risks arising during the course of research, development and production; competition faced by the Company in securing experienced personnel, contracts and sales, and financing; access to adequate infrastructure and resources to support battery materials, components, and cell research and development activities; the risks associated with changes in the technology regulatory regime governing the Company; the risks associated with the timely execution of the Company’s strategies and business plans; the risks associated with the lithium-ion battery industry and end-users’ demand and adoption of the Company’s silicon anode technology and battery products; market adoption and integration challenges, including the difficulty of incorporating silicon anodes and silicon battery products within battery manufacturers and OEMs’ systems; the risks associated with the various environmental and political regulations the Company is subject to; risks related to regulatory and permitting delays; the reliance on key personnel; liquidity risks; the risk of litigation; risk management; and other risk factors as identified in the Company’s recent Financial Statements and MD&A and in recent securities filings for the Company which are available on www.sedarplus.ca. Forward-looking information is based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable at the time such statements are made, including but not limited to, continued R&D and commercialization activities, no material adverse change in precursor, raw material, equipment, and relevant cost prices, development and commercialization plans to proceed in accordance with plans and such plans to achieve their stated expected outcomes, receipt of required regulatory approvals, and such other assumptions and factors as set out herein. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking information. Such forward-looking information has been provided for the purpose of assisting investors in understanding the Company’s business, operations, research and development, and commercialization plans and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is made as of the date of this presentation, and the Company does not undertake to update such forward-looking information except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

 

SOURCE NEO Battery Materials Ltd.

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Huawei Cloud Stack: All for AI, Powering a New Era of Intelligence

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SHANGHAI, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei Cloud Stack Summit, themed “Agentic Hybrid Cloud: Powering a New Era of Intelligence,” brought together leading enterprises from around the world to explore emerging trends in digital infrastructure and AI and share insights from real-world deployments, highlighting how AI can unlock new levels of productivity across industries.

A deterministic hybrid cloud architecture offers enterprises a clear path forward in the agentic AI era

Antonony Gu, President of Huawei Hybrid Cloud, delivered a keynote speech at the summit, highlighting three fundamental changes in the agentic AI era:

The actors driving business execution are changing: from humans using applications to human-agent collaboration and agent-to-agent (A2A) collaboration. AI agents are emerging at scale as a new class of digital employees.Resource provisioning is changing: AI agents are task-oriented, relying on compute, data, and models that are packaged and readily available for invocation. Resource delivery is shifting from layer-by-layer assembly to integrated capabilities organized around agent-driven tasks.What’s being managed is changing: The focus is shifting from traditional IT resources, such as compute, storage, and networking, to AI compute, data, and models. Managing these resources through separate systems can create new IT silos.

Addressing these changes, Huawei Cloud has introduced an AI agent-ready hybrid cloud architectureNext, comprising four key capabilities: an agile, elastic cloud infrastructure designed for continuous evolution and unified general-purpose and AI compute; an AI-native capability hub that connects data, compute, and tokens; an agent-native enablement platform for developing and running AI agents at scale; and intelligent operations and end-to-end security capabilities covering the entire AI agent lifecycle. Antonony Gu emphasized, “As AI agent adoption continues to accelerate over the next three to five years, a deterministic hybrid cloud architecture is a clear path forward for enterprises in the agentic world.”

All for AI: Huawei Cloud Stack evolves for the agentic AI era

As the agentic AI era approaches, Huawei Cloud Stack is evolving across four key areas: infrastructure, data, AI, and ecosystem.

Infrastructure evolution, building the foundation for AI: Huawei Cloud Stack builds Agentic Infra as the foundation for the AI era. This infrastructure supports the latest A5 SuperPoDs. With technologies like NPU pooling and memory snapshots, compute utilization can increase from 30% to 70%. Huawei Cloud Stack also provides an observable, measurable, and governable operations and management framework for AI agents, turning cloud management platforms into intelligent management hubs. It further provides end-to-end protection for infrastructure, models, and AI agents.Unleashing data value, turning enterprise data into intelligent productivity: Huawei Cloud Stack provides end-to-end data lifecycle capabilities for reliable data management, efficient data delivery, intelligent data use, and trusted data circulation. With a decoupled storage and compute architecture, AI DataLake for multimodal data management, and DataArts for intelligent, data-driven decision-making, Huawei Cloud Stack helps turn data from a resource into a source of productivity while laying a solid data foundation for the agentic AI era.AI-driven industry, bringing AI into production across industries: Huawei Cloud is increasing its investment in foundation models and integrating such models with industry know-how to drive automated model iteration and continuous evolution. It offers leading domain-specific foundation models, such as Vision-Language Model (VLM), Scientific Computing Model, and Prediction Model, as well as OptVerse AI Solver for optimization and decision-making. Meanwhile, Huawei Cloud Stack leverages its model training and inference platform to deliver high-performance inference and a reliable supply of high-quality tokens, ensuring uninterrupted execution of agent tasks.Partner co-creation, building an open AI ecosystem together: Huawei Cloud remains committed to open collaboration on AI, backed by targeted incentives and dedicated AI and service capability improvement programs. Together with partners and developers, Huawei Cloud is building an Industry AI Foundry. By bringing together reference solutions and practices from areas such as Smart Finance and Smart Government, it aims to accelerate the replication of proven AI solutions across enterprise scenarios.

Bridging the last mile of production-grade AI: Success stories across industries

As Africa’s largest bank by assets, Standard Bank operates across more than 20 countries and serves over one-fifth of Africa’s population. The bank has chosen Huawei Cloud Stack to build a new, cloud-based banking core. Khomotso Molabe, CIO for Personal & Private Banking and Group Deputy CIO at Standard Bank Group, said that Huawei Cloud Stack meets the bank’s evolving needs for modernizing its core banking systems while ensuring zero data loss and zero errors. This marks a critical step in Standard Bank’s transition to a cloud-native architecture, laying a solid foundation for greater business agility in the future.

Hassan Abbas, CEO of Sky47, shared how Pakistan is rapidly advancing from cloud to AI-driven transformation. He explained that Sky47 has built a national AI cloud platform on Huawei Cloud Stack, integrating locally deployed cloud infrastructure, AI compute, and model development and management capabilities powered by Huawei Cloud ModelArts. The platform provides unified management of compute, storage, networking, and AI resources, and supports the full model lifecycle, from development and deployment to inference and operations. It currently supports a wide range of AI applications, including intelligent Q&A, AI assistants, and generative AI, across key sectors such as finance, manufacturing, energy, and high-tech. By delivering secure, easy-to-use, and scalable cloud and AI services, the platform is helping drive intelligent transformation and injecting new momentum into Pakistan’s digital economy and AI industry.

The agentic AI era is opening up new possibilities for enterprises. Looking ahead, Huawei Cloud Stack, guided by the principle of “All for AI,” will continue to invest heavily in Agentic Infra, data, and AI. Together with partners, Huawei Cloud Stack will foster an open ecosystem, helping enterprises build, use, and manage cloud environments efficiently and bring AI into production across industries.

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Condor Software Unveils World’s First Clinical Finance AI Agent Purpose-Built for Biopharma R&D

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New agent marks major expansion of Condor’s AI platform, enables biopharma R&D teams to ask complex questions about their clinical programs, and instantly get answers they can act on

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Condor, the AI platform for biopharma R&D teams, today unveiled its new clinical finance agent that gives R&D teams the “why” behind variances, runs full what-if scenario planning, and then builds the resulting model directly in Condor. It’s part of a team of agents built on Condor’s clinical and financial ontology and knowledge graph with the Big 4 accounting and consulting firms. The agents automate workflows so R&D teams can make clinical and financial decisions more quickly and confidently.

Condor’s announcement comes as looming patent cliffs across the pharmaceutical industry intensify pressure on companies to replenish their pipelines. While AI has accelerated drug discovery and increased the number of viable candidates, the financial infrastructure drug development runs on remains remarkably manual and labor intensive. When a budget, forecast, and actuals diverge, R&D teams can lose hours, if not days, reconciling data across ERPs, CTMS, EDC systems, and spreadsheets to better understand the financial impact behind the “why”. Lagging decisions have real consequences — like continuing to fund an underperforming site, discovering a change-order problem after negotiations are already underway, or waiting weeks to understand the financial implications of an enrollment change.

The clinical finance agent reasons across an organization’s full budget and forecast history in Condor to explain the “why” behind the numbers, identifying in seconds rather than hours what’s driving a variance between actuals and forecast or the cost to complete a given trial. It also runs full what-if scenario planning, modeling changes to site mix, enrollment timing, or financial investment, and then builds the resulting model directly in the platform. Powered by Condor’s proprietary knowledge graph and a deterministic math layer with AI reasoning on top, the agent is tuned to how R&D teams actually ask questions; not generic corporate forecasting logic. Additionally capabilities will be added to the agent soon.

Here’s how the agent works: you ask the questions that used to take your team weeks to prepare, and instantly get answers you can act on. For example, an R&D team’s clinical operations or finance leader can ask:

“Which sites in this trial are falling behind, and what does that mean for my budget, timeline, and enrollment?” Condor identifies the sites creating risk and connects their performance to the downstream impact on enrollment, timing, and cost.

“What will it cost to complete enrollment?” Condor calculates a cost-to-complete forecast based on the current state of the trial, without waiting weeks for a team to manually rebuild the model.

“Why did my change order increase?” Condor traces the increase back to the clinical and operational activity driving it and identifies where there may be an opportunity to reduce the cost.

To see the agent in action, book a demo at https://condorsoftware.com/contact.

The clinical finance agent is one of several agents in Condor AI Workflows — one of Condor’s three product pillars. Condor Connect automatically centralizes clinical, operational, and financial data with an understanding of a biopharma’s processes. Condor AI Workflows then automates various workflows — like budgeting, forecasts, month-end closes, accruals, and change order management. Condor AI Insights then surfaces patterns, flags risks, bridges context across functions, and delivers the “why” behind the numbers.

Supporting Quotes

“Drug development runs on two things: the science and the money that funds it. For decades, science was the bottleneck. AI and the patent cliff are closing that gap, and pipelines are about to fill with more candidates than this industry has ever had to fund. But the bottleneck didn’t disappear. It moved from the lab to the ledger. Every one of those candidates still has to be forecasted, funded, and managed, and the financial infrastructure doing that job still runs on spreadsheets. The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have a data problem. It has a context problem. Companies have more data than they’ve ever had. But answering a basic question like ‘Why did this trial get more expensive?’ can still require people to hunt across multiple systems and rebuild the answer manually. We started Condor to eliminate that gap, and our new clinical finance agent takes us one huge step closer to realizing our mission of giving biopharma R&D teams the information they need to make clinical and financial decisions quickly and confidently.”

—Condor Founder and CEO Jen Kyle

“Quickly producing the ‘why’ behind the numbers is the biggest pain point that clinical operations and FP&A teams experience. Any system can tell you you’re five million over budget. That’s not useful on its own. You need to know in a clinical context what’s actually driving it, and you need to know fast. Our knowledge graph lets us answer that in a way generic AI can’t, because it intimately understands the context underpinning the clinical trial activities. And it doesn’t stop at the answer; it also builds the model. Our clinical finance agent is one of many Condor AI agents, each purpose-built to remove a specific piece of the manual work that slows R&D teams down.”

— Condor VP of Product Nim Fox

About Condor Software

Condor Software is the AI platform for biopharma R&D teams. It automatically centralizes clinical, operational, and financial data; automates various workflows — like budgeting, forecasts, month-end closes, accruals, and change order management; and then surfaces patterns, flags risks, bridges context across functions, and delivers the “why” behind the numbers. Founded by Jen Kyle, Condor is backed by Insight Partners, Felicis, 645 Ventures, Pamir Ventures, and SNR Ventures, and is trusted by leading biopharma companies worldwide — including Acadia Pharmaceuticals, BridgeBio Pharma, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, and Stemline Therapeutics. Learn more at condorsoftware.com.

Media Contact:
Joseph Roualdes
joseph.roualdes@condorsoftware.com
415.823.2136

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SOURCE Condor Software

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Notes.fm Raises $5 Million to Unify Royalties, Publishing, and Distribution for Independent Artists

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New funding from leading artists and music industry executives—including Zach Bryan, Benny Blanco, Tainy, Ari Emanuel, Julie Greenwald, Sam Hendel, and others—supports the next phase of growth as Notes.fm builds a new financial layer for the music economy

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NEW YORK, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Notes.fm, the music royalty collection platform helping musicians and music companies identify and collect 100% of their royalties, announces it has raised $5 million from leading artists, managers, executives and strategic partners across the music industry. Notes is the latest venture from Stem co-founder Tim Luckow, on a mission to support independent artists with the best-in-class technology for distribution and publishing under one roof so they can have full control over their earnings and stop missing out on money that is rightfully theirs.

The round includes participation from a range of influential artists and music industry leaders from Benny Blanco, Zach Bryan and his managers Stefan Max and Danny Kang, Tainy, Blake Slatkin, and Mt. Joy frontman Matt Quinn, WME Group Executive Chairman Ari Emanuel, Chord Music founder Sam Hendel, longtime Atlantic Records chief and 26.2 founder Julie Greenwald, as well as many of the industry’s leading companies including Foundations, Mick Management, Twenty Ten Management, Triple 8, KMGMT, Good Boy, Mexican Summer, and Breakaway. The funding will support continued platform development and scaled marketing efforts as Notes expands its offering to artists globally.

Notes recently debuted a new feature “Releases” and unveiled its new partnership with Stripe, to streamline distribution, publishing admin and money management into one simplified release flow for musicians. This allows artists to use Notes.fm as the home for both distribution and royalty collection, making it easy for artists and their teams to take simultaneous ownership of their creative output and the income it generates. Notes is founded on the principle that every artist should receive all of their royalties. That’s why they take 0% participation in distribution and publishing royalties, charging a flat monthly subscription fee instead. It’s the same ethos behind their catalog royalty review technology, which helps rights owners identify missing royalties across their catalog and fix the issues so they can claim all of the royalties they’ve earned while they can.

This isn’t new for Notes. Since launch, they’ve rolled out capabilities that allow artists and rights holders to more seamlessly manage their earnings, including integrated financial accounts designed to give users more flexibility in how they collect, store, and transfer, and earn on income. These updates are part of a broader effort to build a more complete financial layer for the modern music ecosystem.

Prior to Releases, Notes also announced  Credits.fm, a free and open music credits database indexing more than 150 million song codes and credits to help the music industry organize, verify, and connect the data powering royalties and artist compensation in the age of AI.

“Music is evolving quickly, and the finance systems around it need to evolve at a faster rate,” said Tim Luckow, CEO and co-founder of Notes.fm. “Between all of the actions required to properly release, credit and collect on music, there are a lot of places where money falls through the cracks. We built Notes to bring all of that into one platform — so artists can release music and collect every royalty from day one, and recover what’s historically been missed.”

“Having spent our careers working with artists at every level, we’ve seen firsthand how much value gets lost to fragmented, unnecessarily complex systems,” adds co-founder Derek Davies. “The response to Notes from the music community has been incredibly meaningful, and we’re proud to announce a raise funded almost exclusively by artists, managers and music industry strategics who have a native understanding of these issues firsthand. This raise gives us the resources to keep building the infrastructure and applications that we believe the next generation of artists deserves.”

Notes has created an artist-friendly, automated process to simplify a notoriously complex and outdated system that has historically led to hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties going unclaimed by artists every year. Notes brings clarity to the complexity, requiring only a musician name and list of songs to start reviewing streaming services, collection societies, and registries like the MLC and SoundExchange. The platform not only identifies missing royalties, but it also helps an artist fix issues and directly claim the royalties that result from those corrections while ensuring future income flows correctly.

Following its public launch last year, Notes has already demonstrated strong early traction, identifying more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties across a broad range of artists and catalogs including James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy, Girl In Red and more. The platform continues to grow across both emerging and established artists, reflecting a shared demand for greater clarity and access in how music earnings are tracked and distributed.

By bringing together royalty discovery, payments infrastructure, and music-centric financial management into a single experience, Notes.fm is helping to create a new system that better supports artists as their careers and audiences grow.

About Notes.fm
Notes.fm is a music royalty collection platform built to help independent musicians, artists and music companies collect all of their royalties in one easy-to-use place. Founded by Stem co-founder Tim Luckow, Notes brings distribution, publishing, and financial tools under one roof, giving musicians and companies the technology to release music, verify song credits, manage their catalogs, and collect every royalty they’re owed. Music Royalties, Simplified.

Learn more at www.notes.fm.

The Untold: Chelsey Northern (cn@wearetheuntold.com), Chloé Snyder (cs@wearetheuntold.com), Cory Councill (cc@wearetheuntold.com)

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SOURCE Notes.fm

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