LONDON, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Neudata, a global leader in alternative and market data intelligence, today announced the appointment of Richard Barnett as Chief Product Officer. The appointment comes as Neudata increases its focus on product innovation and accelerates the development of new solutions in response to evolving client and market needs. Based in London, Richard joins Neudata’s leadership team and will lead the company’s product strategy, portfolio and roadmap.

Rado Lipuš, CEO and founder of Neudata, said: “Our ambition is to make Neudata one of the most innovative companies in the data intelligence market. Our deep understanding of both the data landscape and the needs of institutional investors gives us a unique perspective on how the market is evolving, particularly as AI creates new ways to use and derive value from data. Through initiatives such as the Neudata Innovation Lab, we want to move quickly to turn those insights into new products and solutions. Richard brings the experience, creativity and product leadership we need to accelerate that ambition.”

With over 20 years of product leadership experience across financial information and B2B software, Richard has held senior product and digital leadership roles at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, building and leading global product and UX teams across some of the industry’s most widely used platforms. More recently, he has advised established and scaling businesses on product strategy and transformation, and served as fractional CPO at Instinct Digital, where he led product strategy and the development of AI-enabled capabilities for asset managers.

At Neudata, Richard will lead the product management team and oversee the company’s product portfolio, translating client needs and market insights into a clear roadmap for development and growth. He will work closely with the Neudata Innovation Lab to assess new opportunities and bring validated ideas into the roadmap. His initial priorities will include advancing Neudata Ranger, the company’s market data intelligence product, helping clients evaluate market data providers and make more informed sourcing decisions.

Neudata’s Innovation Lab brings together insights from across the company, its clients, partners and the wider data market to identify unmet needs, test ideas and validate opportunities for new products and features.

Richard Barnett said: “Neudata combines deep knowledge of the data market with a close understanding of what clients need. That’s a strong foundation to build on. I’m looking forward to working with the team to develop products that help clients make better decisions about data, build on Ranger’s capabilities and address new opportunities as the market evolves.”

About Neudata

Neudata is an independent alternative and market data intelligence platform connecting institutional data buyers with data providers. Founded over 10 years ago, Neudata today connects more than 1,000 data buyers with over 4,400 data providers and 11,000+ datasets, providing unbiased research and analysis that helps clients discover, evaluate and manage external datasets with confidence. A team of 100 people across London, New York and Shanghai runs Neudata’s Scout and Ranger platforms, its global events programme and its 1-to-1 networking programme, AltDating. Neudata also helps organisations monetise their existing data assets through its consulting services. For more information, visit www.neudata.co.

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Fortnum & Mason and ASOS share how automation helps them grow across markets

LONDON, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, today opened its CRUSH Europe customer conference by showing how businesses can use automation and agentic AI to manage growing tax and compliance complexity while moving faster across markets. Fortnum & Mason and ASOS joined Avalara at the conference to share how their organizations are using compliance automation to support global growth as regulatory requirements become increasingly digital, interconnected, and real-time.

Selling at speed and global scale

Fortnum & Mason, a 315-year-old British institution, ships to customers in nearly 90 countries. Automating sales tax, import tax, and duties calculations, including the complex classification of food and non-food goods, allows the team to focus on serving customers and delivering exceptional products and services. The company shared its story at Avalara’s conference.

“When delivering across multiple countries and some unique destinations, accurate tax and duties calculations are essential,” said Nataliya Schipka, Director of Finance at Fortnum & Mason. “Automating cross-border compliance allows us to focus on serving customers wherever they are, rather than being constrained by the complexity of compliance.”

Fortnum & Mason was joined at CRUSH Europe by ASOS, one of the world’s leading online fashion retailers. Operating at the pace of global fashion means launching products, entering markets, and adapting to regulatory change quickly, while delivering a seamless checkout experience for customers around the world. ASOS uses compliance automation to support that speed and scale without relying on added headcount simply to keep pace with growing complexity.

Their experiences reflect a broader challenge facing businesses across Europe. Tax and compliance requirements are becoming more interconnected, more digital, and increasingly real-time, while businesses are under pressure to move faster. For years, software has automated individual compliance tasks, but much of the work between those tasks and systems has remained manual. Avalara believes meeting that challenge requires rethinking how the work gets done.

New purpose-built agentic AI solutions for tax and compliance

At CRUSH Europe, Avalara showed how agentic AI can help close those gaps by orchestrating work across tax and compliance processes and systems.

Avalara Aviator, which is generally available today, is the company’s new agent hub for tax and compliance. It’s designed to turn days of manual work into minutes of oversight, with an audit-defensible record for every action. Intelligent agents can understand context, coordinate work, monitor variance, and take action, while bringing people in when judgment or approval is required.

Among other compliance operations, Avalara Aviator can map products to tax codes, validate exemption certificates, auto-generate tax matrices, configure custom rules, and analyze results across applications. It is grounded in trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, deterministic technology, and governance Avalara has built over more than 22 years, informed by more than £2.1 trillion in transactions Avalara handles annually.

Versori by Avalara, Avalara’s agentic integration fabric, addresses another critical part of that challenge: bringing tax and compliance intelligence into the systems and data where businesses already work. In an agentic world, compliance work won’t always begin inside compliance software. It may start in an ERP, an e-commerce platform, a finance system, or an AI agent. Versori uses specialized AI agents to research, build, test, and deploy production-grade connectors in days rather than months at a fraction of the cost of traditional integration tools. 

“AI is changing how work gets done across every industry,” said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara, in his CRUSH keynote. “But agentic AI is different. It can execute multi-step work, continuously monitor what is changing, and bring people in when judgment or approval is required. The opportunity is automation and control, not one at the expense of the other. In tax, the calculation still has to be right. The filing still has to be defensible. And the person accountable is still a person.”

Built for Europe’s mandate wave

Governments across Europe are moving compliance closer to the transaction, and mandatory e-invoicing will extend digital reporting to cross-border B2B transactions across the EU from 2030. Avalara lets businesses integrate once through a single global API, then activate individual country mandates through configuration rather than repeated reimplementation. Avalara has been an approved platform in France since September 2026 and expects to be ready for Germany in January 2027 and Spain in October 2027. Avalara was recently named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide E-Invoicing Compliance Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc #EUR154882626, September 2026).

About Avalara
Avalara is the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance. For more than two decades, Avalara’s trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, and technology have helped customers succeed on a global scale. Avalara now pairs that foundation with agentic AI to help businesses execute complex compliance work while keeping people in control. Avalara processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls annually and supports millions of businesses worldwide. For more information, visit Avalara.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding Avalara’s product plans, technology capabilities, and expected availability dates. These statements describe Avalara’s intentions as of the date of release and are subject to change without notice.

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SOURCE Avalara, Inc.

The first patent case in the imaging accessories industry to complete litigation and enforcement offers a practical reference for rights holders

SHENZHEN, China, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The High People’s Court of Guangdong Province has issued a final, legally binding judgment in favor of Shenzhen Leqi Innovation Co., Ltd., the company behind SmallRig, in a design patent infringement case involving Shenzhen Neewer Technology Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Xing Ying Da Industry Co., Ltd. The court held that the accused products fall within the scope of protection of Leqi Innovation’s design patent, dismissed Neewer Technology’s appeal and affirmed the trial court’s judgment in its entirety.

Under the judgment, the two defendant companies were ordered to cease manufacturing and selling the side handles at issue, destroy remaining inventory of the infringing products and related promotional materials, bear all court costs, and pay damages to Leqi Innovation. The damages awarded under the judgment have been paid in full.

The case is the first patent enforcement action in the imaging accessories industry to proceed through the entire judicial process, from evidence collection through trial, appeal and enforcement of the judgment, including full payment of damages. It provides a practical reference for companies seeking to enforce their patent rights in similar infringement cases.

Rapid growth in short-form video and livestreaming has increased demand for imaging accessories such as camera cages, side handles and cold shoe rails. Alongside that expansion, the market has seen a proliferation of products that closely resemble established designs in both appearance and construction. Some sellers copy other brands’ product designs and structural features, making only minor changes to logos or colors before selling them at lower prices to gain market share through Chinese e-commerce channels and international marketplaces such as Amazon.

Tooling, contract manufacturing and online distribution are often handled by separate entities. This fragmented supply chain makes it harder for rights holders to trace products to their source, collect evidence and identify and pursue the responsible parties. Cases involving overseas platforms also require additional cross-border notarization procedures, increasing both the time and cost of enforcement.

Founded in 2010, Leqi Innovation launched SmallRig in 2013. The brand provides a full range of professional photography and filmmaking accessories to creators worldwide. Its portfolio includes camera and smartphone accessories, lighting and control equipment, power solutions, and microphones. 

The company continues to invest in research and development while building a comprehensive, multilayered strategy for patent protection. It has pursued patent infringement actions involving a range of competing products in the market, allocating enforcement resources based on the circumstances of each case and prioritizing litigation involving patents covering its core products and technologies.

Across the imaging industry, companies such as DJI and Insta360 have also strengthened their intellectual property strategies in recent years, as original product developers become more willing to defend their rights in court. Where many manufacturers once chose not to take action against copycat products, leading companies now have established procedures for routinely collecting evidence and enforcing their rights. In pursuing infringement claims, rights holders may also seek to recover reasonable enforcement costs, including expenses associated with notarization, legal fees and evidence collection, as they seek compensation for losses tied to their R&D investments.

Intellectual property professionals say the final judgment, which granted all relief sought by the patent holder, reinforces judicial protection of design patent rights.

Companies still face practical challenges in enforcing their patent rights. Seeking preservation measures across multiple design patent cases involves significant procedural hurdles, while lengthy court proceedings and parallel actions add to the overall cost.

To support a healthier market for photography and filmmaking accessories, companies can continue investing in R&D, strengthen their patent portfolios and make effective use of legal remedies to protect their intellectual property. Industry associations and the courts can also work together to improve procedures and support for handling multiple intellectual property cases and reduce the barriers to enforcement. These efforts would promote competition based on original product development rather than low-cost imitation and products that closely replicate existing designs.

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SOURCE SmallRig