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NetDragon Partners with Jiuzhou Culture to Establish Joint Venture

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Takes Controlling Stake in AI Harness Business to Advance a Third Growth Engine

HONG KONG, Oct. 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited (“NetDragon” or the “Company”; Hong Kong Stock Code: 0777), a global leader in building internet communities, is pleased to announce that it has entered into a legally binding memorandum of understanding (“MOU”) with Jiuzhou Culture (“Jiuzhou”), a leading AIGC short drama production and distribution company in China, to establish a joint venture (“JV”) in which NetDragon will hold a 51% controlling interest. The partnership will focus on artificial intelligence technologies, AIGC-powered content creation and digital technology services, further expanding NetDragon’s AI application scenarios and commercialisation opportunities while accelerating the development of a new growth engine.

Deepening the Integration of AIGC and Content to Build a Diversified Digital Business Platform

Rapid advances in AIGC are continuing to reshape content creation, digital entertainment and software services. With the ongoing maturation of generative AI, large-scale AI models and AI agents, AI is evolving from a supporting tool into a productivity platform that can enhance the entire value chain, from content creation and production to operations and commercialisation. Through the JV Company, NetDragon and Jiuzhou will combine their complementary strengths in technology, IP, content and industry resources to accelerate the deployment of AIGC across real-world commercial applications.

Under the MOU, Jiuzhou will inject into the JV Company all intellectual property, technologies and assets relating to the AI Harness system business, laying a solid foundation for product development and commercialisation. NetDragon will contribute Hong Kong dollars cash equivalent to RMB 50 million to the JV Company, acquire a 51% shareholding interest and consolidate the JV Company’s financial results. The JV Company will focus on expanding foundational artificial intelligence software, large-scale AI models and the AI Harness system business. It is expected to serve as the first commercial validation platform in China for NetDragon’s “AI ecosystem co-creation” strategy, marking the launch of the Company’s third growth engine and laying the groundwork for the business model to be replicated and scaled across various sectors.

To accelerate the scalable commercialisation of the AI Harness business, the transaction also incorporates a multi-tiered, progressive performance-based incentive warrant scheme. NetDragon will issue 25 million unlisted warrants to Jiuzhou at an issue price of HK$0.10 per warrant share, to be granted in three tranches with initial exercise prices of HK$10, HK$12 and HK$15, respectively. The warrants will only become exercisable upon achievement of specified key performance indicators by the JV Company. Assuming full exercise of all warrants at the initial exercise prices, NetDragon will receive aggregate gross proceeds of approximately HK$314 million, which will supplement the Company’s development capital while achieving deep alignment of interests and shared equity upside with its strategic partner. 

Strengthening AI Ecosystem Synergies to Drive a Third Growth Engine

As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into content production, digital services and global operations, NetDragon and Jiuzhou will take this collaboration as a new starting point to fully leverage their complementary strengths and accelerate the commercialisation of AI capabilities, translating technological innovation into tangible business value. In recent years, NetDragon has continued to advance its AI strategy across AI+gaming, AI+education and enterprise intelligence, while actively exploring emerging AI businesses with the potential to establish independent commercial models. Jiuzhou, meanwhile, has built deep expertise in micro-dramas and digital content, with an integrated value chain spanning copyright operations, content creation, co-production, paid distribution and official distribution. It has also continued to expand the use of AIGC across content production, creation and operations. The two parties will further explore the deep integration of AI technology with the content industry, accelerating the implementation of AI capabilities in scenarios such as content generation, AI model applications, translation and localisation, platform operations, and enterprise technology services, to build scalable and sustainable business models.

Following the launch of the MOYU AI platform in August 2026, NetDragon’s investment and controlling stake in the AI Harness business marks another important step in increasing resource allocation to its AI business and broadening its long-term growth pathways. The performance-linked equity incentive collaboration with Jiuzhou is expected to establish a new model of strategic collaboration for NetDragon, enabling the Company and its partners to grow the business together and share in the value created. Looking ahead, NetDragon will remain focused on its core AI business, deepen technological innovation and resource integration, and leverage its established strengths in gaming and education alongside the emerging growth engine of AI ecosystem co-creation. Under this three-pronged strategy, the Company aims to continuously strengthen its core competitiveness, enhance long-term investment value, and deliver sustainable returns to shareholders.

About NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited

NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited (HKSE: 777) is a global leader in building internet communities, with a long track record of developing and scaling multiple internet and mobile platforms that impact hundreds of millions of users. Over the desktop and mobile internet eras, NetDragon previously established China’s first online gaming portal, 17173.com, and China’s most influential smartphone app store platform, 91 Wireless.   

Established in 1999, NetDragon is one of the most reputable and well-known digital entertainment IP developers and operators in China with a history of successful flagship game titles deeply welcomed by users both at home and abroad. For more than a decade, NetDragon has also achieved success with its EdTech business both domestically and globally. Fully embracing the new AI era, NetDragon is driving its vision of “Infinite Growth” through AI-enabled digital entertainment and online learning, whilst building a systematic AI product methodology to create value growth.

NetDragon’s overseas edtech business entity, currently a U.S.-listed subsidiary named Mynd.ai, is a global leader in interactive technology and its award-winning interactive displays and software can be found in more than 2 million learning and training spaces across 126 countries. 

About Jiuzhou Culture

Founded in 2021, Jiuzhou is a leading player in the online micro-drama industry, with an integrated business model spanning copyright operations, content creation, co-production, paid distribution and official distribution. The company has established a comprehensive, end-to-end content ecosystem designed to enhance operational efficiency and unlock synergies across the value chain. Embracing technological innovation, Jiuzhou actively integrates cutting-edge technologies such as AIGC to enhance content quality and creative capabilities. Its self-developed Moss tool has accelerated AI adoption across the entire value chain, leveraging technology to advance the development of the global short drama ecosystem.

In terms of content creation, Jiuzhou has accumulated the rights to more than 4,000 short dramas and has successfully distributed over 1,000 productions. Its portfolio spans more than 20 popular genres, including contemporary drama, romance, campus life, fantasy, suspense and historical fiction, catering to the diverse entertainment preferences of audiences in China and worldwide. By combining paid content, free-to-view short dramas and international expansion, Jiuzhou has developed a distinctive business ecosystem that strengthens its competitive position and drives continued innovation in the micro-drama industry.

Internationally, the company leverages its strengths in content production, audience reach and distribution networks to bring Chinese micro-dramas to global audiences while tailoring its offerings to local tastes and cultural preferences. Its flagship international platform, ShortMax, focuses primarily on North American and European markets, offering a wide selection of localized Chinese dramas and original productions. ShortMax is now available in more than 200 countries and regions worldwide, having achieved peak monthly active users (MAU) of over 30 million, more than 90 million cumulative registered users and 200 million downloads.

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SOURCE NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited

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CollectivIQ Introduces GigaBrain, Giving Enterprises a Shared Brain That Gets Smarter as Employees Work

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New Enterprise Intelligence Layer Turns the Collective Learnings of AI Agents Into Secure, Usable Organizational Knowledge

BOSTON, Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CollectivIQ, the collective intelligence platform built to give employees more honest AI insights and digital teammates that put its intelligence to work, today announced the availability of GigaBrain, a new shared intelligence layer that enables organizations to capture, connect, and use the knowledge accumulated by employees and their Digital Direct Reports (DDRs), which are specialized AI teammates that work for people much like human direct reports do. Every company has valuable knowledge that lives outside its formal systems, across various tools, residing in employees’ heads, embedded in conversations, and lodged in disparate company applications. GigaBrain is designed to make that collective intelligence available to the organization and its employees.

As employees work with their Digital Direct Reports, those AI teammates develop context about their work, including projects, processes, responsibilities, relationships, and preferences. With GigaBrain, those individual learnings can contribute to a shared enterprise memory, allowing knowledge developed in one part of an organization to make AI more useful across the business. The result is an enterprise AI environment that gets smarter through use. Rather than requiring employees to repeatedly find, upload or explain the same information, GigaBrain gives employees and their Digital Direct Reports access to relevant organizational context when they need it.

When a sales representative’s DDR learns the intricacies of a customer’s procurement process, including approval requirements, key decision-makers, and purchasing timelines, that knowledge can automatically become available to other team members, subject to appropriate access permissions. When the customer reaches out for help, the team will already have the context needed to navigate the relationship effectively, without asking the customer to repeat information or relying on a manual handoff.

“Companies are collectively spending billions to bring intelligence to their employees, but very little of that investment makes the company itself smarter,” said John Davie, CEO of CollectivIQ. “The breakthrough isn’t just giving every employee an AI teammate, it’s making sure what those employees and AI teammates learn becomes an advantage for the entire organization. GigaBrain turns everyday work into intelligence that compounds across the enterprise.”

While enterprise AI platforms such as Microsoft Copilot and Glean help employees access organizational information, GigaBrain is designed to capture knowledge that emerges through employees’ day-to-day interactions with their DDRs, including insights that may never be formally documented. GigaBrain creates an organizational knowledge layer that can connect what employees and their Digital Direct Reports learn through everyday work, giving AI access to relevant internal context alongside the broader knowledge available from large language models.

GigaBrain was built to provide a source of enterprise knowledge that Digital Direct Reports can draw upon as they work, including the ability to trace information back to its source, giving employees greater visibility into where organizational knowledge came from, and helping AI work from relevant company context. Employees do not need to manually document every useful insight for the system to become more valuable. As they collaborate with their Digital Direct Reports, relevant knowledge can become part of the enterprise intelligence available to other authorized AI teammates.

GigaBrain is also designed for the realities of enterprise information governance, as employees can use an incognito mode when working with information that should not contribute to shared organizational memory, giving users a way to keep sensitive or confidential interactions out of GigaBrain.

GigaBrain expands CollectivIQ’s vision for Digital Direct Reports beyond individual AI productivity, allowing the knowledge developed through that work to become part of a broader organizational intelligence layer. Together, they give companies a foundation for AI that does more than answer questions. CollectivIQ’s ecosystem can learn how an organization works, retain what it learns and make that knowledge useful across the enterprise.

GigaBrain is available through the CollectivIQ platform. For more information, visit www.collectiviq.ai.

About CollectivIQ

CollectivIQ is the collective intelligence platform built to give employees more accurate AI insights and teammates that put its intelligence to work. Founded by the leadership team behind Buyers Edge Platform, CollectivIQ was built to bring accountability, action, and economic alignment to enterprise AI adoption. Learn more at www.collectiviq.ai.

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SOURCE CollectivIQ

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Pactum Launches Intake Agent, Cutting Purchase Request Cycle Time by 90%

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New AI agent replaces complicated purchase forms and repeated follow-ups by completing and checking every request before it is submitted, inside Microsoft Teams, Coupa, and SAP Ariba.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Pactum, the most advanced agentic AI platform for enterprise autonomous procurement execution, today announced the launch of its Intake Agent, which lets employees describe what they need to buy in plain language. The agent turns each request into a complete, correctly coded requisition and checks it against company buying policies before it is submitted.  Available now in Microsoft Teams, Coupa, and SAP Ariba, the Intake Agent connects with Pactum’s other agents to enable end-to-end autonomous indirect procurement. A purchase can draw on an existing contract or move to autonomous sourcing and negotiation, with a human buyer handling requests that require judgment.

The launch extends Pactum’s growing portfolio of AI agents to the start of indirect procurement, covering purchases such as software, office equipment, and professional services. It brings Pactum’s co-founders’ vision of procurement run with AI agents from the first request through sourcing and negotiation into operation. Procurement teams set the buying rules once, and the agent applies them to every request, whatever its value.

“Procurement teams can now run indirect procurement with full autonomy while remaining in control and managing the exceptions,” said Kaspar Korjus, Co-Founder and CEO of Pactum. “Our Intake Agent helps resolve questions earlier so requests can move forward with less back-and-forth and teams can focus on the decisions that need their expertise.”

For employees, finding an approved supplier or selecting the right accounting code can require expertise across procurement, finance, operations, and IT teams. Missing or incorrect information can lead to rejected requisitions and repeated follow-ups, leaving buyers to focus on correcting forms instead of focusing on supplier relationships and commercial decisions. Review queues can stretch from days to weeks.

With Pactum Intake, employees describe what the business needs, whether goods or services of any complexity, and can provide supporting documents such as a supplier quote. The agent uses the request and relevant documents to identify the best procurement category and complete the accounting and supplier details. It asks only the follow-up questions needed to complete the requisition. Once the request is checked, it is handed off to another Pactum digital worker to autonomously source and negotiate for better pricing and terms where required.

“Building software that assists procurement professionals is relatively easy. Building software that runs the whole process on its own, from the first request to the final purchase, is much harder,” said Kristjan Korjus, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Pactum. “It is the difference between driver assistance and a car with no one behind the wheel. Most procurement AI still needs a buyer at the wheel for every request. Our AI agents take the request all the way to the purchase on their own, and it is remarkable to watch them pass the work from one agent to the next.”

The launch follows Pactum’s Requisition Alignment Agent surpassing one million requisition checks, which validates purchase requests against company buying policies, existing contracts, and approved suppliers. Intake builds on this foundation in policy enforcement by connecting employee requests with agents that carry out sourcing and negotiation.

For more information about Pactum Intake, visit https://pactum.com/procurement-agents/intake.     

About Pactum:

Since 2019, Pactum has been leading the shift to autonomous procurement. Its AI agents check every purchase request against a company’s policies, contracts and approved suppliers, source and negotiate with suppliers in more than 40 languages, and work inside Coupa and SAP Ariba. Pactum agents are relied on by more than 60 of the world’s largest enterprises. To learn more, visit www.pactum.com.

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SOURCE Pactum

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Crush Security Launches Crush Dollar Exposure, Turning Cyber Risk Into Dollars and Showing Which Security Investments Reduce It Most

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New financial risk intelligence capability uses FAIR-informed modeling, Monte Carlo analysis and security data to help CISOs and CFOs quantify cyber exposure, prioritize remediation and communicate financial risk to executive leadership.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Crush Security today announced the launch of Crush Dollar Exposure, a new capability within its cybersecurity intelligence platform that translates cyber risk into financial exposure and helps organizations identify which security improvements can deliver the greatest reduction in potential financial loss.

For years, cybersecurity teams have measured their environments through vulnerabilities, risk scores, compliance percentages and control gaps. While valuable to security operations, those measurements often fail to answer the fundamental questions that executives and boards need answered:

How much could our cybersecurity weaknesses cost the business, and where should we invest to reduce that exposure?

Crush Dollar Exposure is designed to answer those questions by connecting an organization’s security posture, control coverage, threat intelligence and industry financial loss data to a quantitative view of cyber risk. The result is a financial perspective that enables security and business leaders to evaluate potential losses, compare remediation priorities and make more informed investment decisions.

From Technical Risk Scores to Financial Decisions

Traditional cybersecurity assessments often produce long lists of findings ranked by technical severity. But the most technically severe vulnerability is not necessarily the one that represents the greatest potential financial loss to the organization.

Crush Dollar Exposure changes the decision-making process by evaluating security gaps through their estimated contribution to financial risk. The capability provides four principal measurements:

Annualized Financial Exposure: An estimate of potential annual cyber losses, expressed in dollars.Financial Exposure Relative to Revenue: A view of modeled cyber exposure in relation to the organization’s annual revenue, providing business context.Value-at-Risk Analysis: Potential loss thresholds at selected probability levels, supported by loss-exceedance curves that illustrate the range of possible financial outcomes.Financially Prioritized Remediation: Security control gaps ranked by their modeled contribution to financial exposure, helping teams identify where remediation may reduce the most risk.

Rather than simply reporting that a security control is missing or a vulnerability is critical, Crush Dollar Exposure helps organizations understand the potential financial consequences and prioritize corrective action accordingly.

Connecting Every Security Gap to Business Impact

One of the capability’s key differentiators is its ability to connect security control weaknesses to modeled loss scenarios and financial consequences.

For example, a security team evaluating investments in identity protection, endpoint security and vulnerability remediation can use the model to determine which weaknesses contribute most significantly to estimated financial exposure. This allows security leaders to move beyond asking which problem is technically most severe and begin asking which investment is likely to provide the greatest financial risk reduction.

The analysis also connects control gaps to underlying loss scenarios, helping organizations understand how multiple weaknesses may contribute to the same business risk. For CFOs and executive teams, this provides a more financially grounded way to evaluate cybersecurity spending. For CISOs, it creates a defensible framework for explaining security priorities and communicating their potential business impact.

Transparent, Reproducible Risk Modeling — Not a Black-Box AI Score

Crush Dollar Exposure uses a quantitative methodology informed by the Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) framework and Monte Carlo simulation to model possible financial losses.

The methodology incorporates security control coverage, industry-relevant threat activity, recognized adversary techniques, organizational characteristics and established financial loss reference data.

Unlike opaque risk-scoring approaches, the capability is designed to make the assumptions, data inputs and modeled loss scenarios underlying its financial estimates visible and reviewable. Although Crush Security’s broader platform includes Cassandra, its AI-powered security advisor, the financial risk calculations themselves rely on defined quantitative modeling rather than generative AI.

The capability distinguishes between uncertainty in modeled financial outcomes and confidence in the quality of supporting data, helping executives understand both the estimated exposure and the limitations of the underlying analysis. This transparency is intended to support repeatable analysis, auditability and more defensible conversations with boards, regulators and financial stakeholders.

Giving CISOs and CFOs a Common Language

“Cybersecurity leaders are constantly asked to justify their budgets, but we’re still presenting information to boards that doesn’t directly answer the questions they’re asking,” said Josh Jones, CEO and Co-Founder of Crush Security. “Boards don’t just want to know how many vulnerabilities you have or how many security tools you’ve deployed. They want to understand what the risk could cost the business, where their money is going, and whether those investments are making a measurable difference.”

“With Crush Dollar Exposure, we’re connecting cybersecurity decisions to financial outcomes. Our goal is to give every CISO the ability to walk into a board meeting and explain their organization’s estimated financial exposure, identify the gaps driving it, and show which actions have the greatest potential to reduce that risk.” -Joshua Jones, CEO-

Built on the Crush Security Intelligence Platform

Crush Dollar Exposure extends Crush Security’s intelligence platform, which brings together vendor, control, compliance and threat data to support security investment decisions.

Powered by Cassandra, the platform helps organizations identify coverage gaps, compare technology and vendors, and optimize cybersecurity spending.

Risk calculations are performed within each customer’s data environment, with customer-specific information remaining within its designated security boundary. Anonymized and aggregated industry reference information supports comparative risk modeling.

Availability

Crush Dollar Exposure is available now within the Crush Security platform. Organizations interested in quantifying their financial cyber exposure, evaluating remediation priorities or scheduling a demonstration can visit www.CrushSecurity.com. Access information is available directly from Crush Security.

About Crush Security

Crush Security is a veteran-owned cybersecurity technology and advisory company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Its proprietary intelligence platform, advisory services and cybersecurity procurement data help customers make data-driven technology purchasing decisions leveraging Crush Security’s resell capabilities.

Cassandra, its AI-powered advisor, unifies security, vendor and compliance intelligence to identify gaps, optimize investments, quantify risk and evaluate solutions to shorten the decision time and accuracy for each project.

Crush Security’s core intelligence platform is currently included at no separate subscription cost with eligible customer engagements.

Website: www.CrushSecurity.com

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SOURCE Crush Security Group Inc

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