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Azra AI and Blackford Announce Strategic Partnership to Close the Gap Between Imaging AI and Enterprise Care Coordination

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Partnership bridges the gap between AI-detected findings and patient navigation, enabling health systems to act on incidental findings at scale

NASHVILLE, Tenn. and EDINBURGH, Scotland, Aug. 5, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Azra AI, the enterprise platform powering oncology navigation and incidental finding management across hundreds of U.S. hospitals, and Blackford, the pioneering enterprise AI platform and solutions provider for medical imaging, today announced a strategic partnership to advance the detection-to-treatment pathway for patients with complex and time-sensitive diagnoses.

The partnership connects Blackford’s enterprise AI platform, which integrates and deploys clinically validated AI capabilities across radiology workflows at scale, with Azra AI’s care coordination and navigation capabilities, enabling health systems to ensure that identified patients are promptly reached, navigated, and managed through the appropriate care pathway.

Closing the Loop Between Detection and Action

Health systems face a persistent challenge: imaging AI can surface critical findings, but without a coordinated follow-up infrastructure, those findings risk falling through the cracks. Together, Azra AI and Blackford address both sides of this equation, combining Blackford’s portfolio of 130+ AI imaging applications with Azra AI’s proven ability to identify, connect, and manage patients across the care continuum.

“A finding that is detected but not followed up on is not a win for the patient. Our mission at Azra AI is to ensure every identified patient gets connected to the right care, at the right time. Partnering with Blackford means we can pursue that mission earlier in the patient journey, from the moment a finding appears on an image to the moment that patient walks through the door for treatment.”

— John Marshall, CEO, Azra AI

“Our platform gives health systems the AI capabilities they need across the imaging workflow. Partnering with Azra AI means those capabilities don’t stop at detection, they carry through into how patients get seen and treated.”

— James Holroyd, Managing Director, Blackford

About Azra AI

Azra AI is a healthcare enterprise platform that operationalizes underutilized data to orchestrate and optimize care delivery, guiding patients from detection to treatment and increasing retention and improving outcomes with return-on-care made visible through real-time reporting. Deployed across hundreds of U.S. hospitals and health systems, Azra AI’s platform supports oncology navigation, incidental finding management, and enterprise care coordination. Learn more at azra-ai.com.

About Blackford

Blackford is a pioneering enterprise AI platform and solutions provider with over a decade of experience working with leading hospitals, radiology groups, imaging centers, and technology providers. Blackford’s platform provides access to 130+ AI applications across 8 clinical and operational service lines, seamlessly integrated into existing imaging workflows. Learn more at blackfordanalysis.com.

Media Contacts

Azra AI
Kaci Hollingsworth
Kaci.hollingsworth@azra-ai.com 

Blackford
Victoria Hopkins
Victoria.hopkins@blackfordanalysis.com

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Lumos Launches MCP Governance to Provide Agent Runtime Security

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Security and IT teams get visibility and control over MCP usage and agent tool calls, starting with Claude Code and Codex.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Lumos, the identity management platform for the agentic era, is releasing MCP Governance for Claude Code and Codex. MCP Governance checks an AI agent’s permissions at the moment it acts, and blocks the action if policy does not allow it.

Enterprises are rolling out AI coworkers faster than they can govern them. An agent inherits the permissions of the person who launched it, and then works at machine speed. A single employee might delete one Salesforce record by mistake, but their agent can delete a thousand in seconds.

“We spent twenty years learning to govern humans, and we still have not finished,” said Andrej Safundzic, CEO and co-founder of Lumos. “Now we have agents doing the same work ten times faster. Just here at Lumos, with fewer than 200 employees, we measured over 450,000 agent actions in a single week. That kind of scale is impossible to track with old methods.”

The industry has answered this problem with inventory, but registering every agent only tells a security team that an agent exists. It does not tell them what that agent can reach, and it does not tell them what it did.

Lumos is taking a different position. Permissions set the upper bound of what an agent is allowed to do. What the agent actually does happens at runtime, and until now identity teams have had no way to govern that moment. MCP Governance moves the decision to the point of action.

“The teams I talk to are not trying to slow AI down. They are trying to say yes,” said Safundzic. “One customer would not turn on an integration for their marketing team because too many people had access to the underlying tool. That decision cost them pipeline. Governance at the moment of action is how you turn that no into a yes.”

“Identity has always governed what someone is allowed to do,” said Leo Mehr, co-founder of Lumos. “It has never governed what they actually did, because humans move slowly enough that review after the fact was good enough. Agents changed that. By the time you review an agent’s activity, it has already made a few thousand decisions. The only place left to govern is the moment before the action runs.”

MCP Governance extends the work Lumos has already done on non-human identity. Lumos maps every identity and permission across human, machine, and AI identities. MCP Governance covers the other half of the problem, which is control over what those identities do.

MCP Governance is available today for teams running Claude Code and Codex, with support for more agents to follow.

Learn more about MCP Governance by scheduling a demo today.

About Lumos

Lumos is the first identity platform built around autonomous agents, not manual workflows. Security teams use Lumos to give every human, machine, and AI agent a living control layer that watches and governs access in real time. Traditional identity governance was built for human workflows and periodic reviews. AI makes the problem bigger, messier, and faster: more identities to protect, more permissions to govern, and less time to catch abuse. Lumos helps teams at companies like Mars, Netskope, Assurant, and GitLab move faster, reduce risk, and prove compliance, all while keeping humans in control.

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Ande Raises $52M Seed and Series A to Launch The First Entertainment Operating System For Enterprises

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Ande brings corporate entertainment into a single platform and gives venues a direct channel to enterprise bookings.

NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ande, the AI-native network for corporate entertainment, emerges from stealth with more than $52 million in seed and Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, and Sierra Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures.

Enterprises spend an estimated $325 billion a year on entertainment from client dinners and team outings to catering, sporting events, and gifting. Yet the booking and expense management behind it is fragmented across credit cards, AP systems, and consumer apps creating an extremely manual reconciliation process for finance teams.

Ande brings structure to one of the last unmanaged categories of enterprise spend by giving teams a single platform to book entertainment effortlessly, while finance and legal teams keep full visibility and control over every dollar spent.

Ande’s agentic workflows surface venue availability, book experiences, route approvals, execute contracts, and reconcile expenses automatically. Executive assistants, office managers, field marketers, GTM teams, and their managers all work together in a single, multiplayer workspace in order to book team offsites and deal-closing dinners, while the agents move each request through approval, signing, and payment.

More than 60 enterprises already run their entertainment on Ande, reporting savings of 12 to 15 percent. Customers like Cloudflare, Salesforce, McGraw Hill, Netskope, Navan, Sigma Computing, Monday.com, Workato, Semgrep, Checkout, Rillet, and many more contribute to over $400 million in entertainment spend flowing through the platform annually.

“Entertainment is one of the most important things a company does. It builds culture, closes deals and deepens the relationships that matter most. Yet the infrastructure to manage it is broken on both sides of every transaction,” said Lohit Sarma, CEO and co-founder of Ande.

“Ande is the first enterprise channel between corporate buyers and the world’s best entertainment vendors. Part of the reason this is such a hard problem to solve is that venues and entertainment providers don’t have a centralized distribution system to plug into. We had to build it. We’ve spent two and half years working with venues to digitize their data, and train models and agents for these workflows that are unique to enterprises,” continued Sarma.

For venues on the other side of the transaction, Ande is the corporate sales and marketing channel that never existed. Venues have historically had no pipeline into the corporate market. Ande gives them a platform to market to, engage with, and transact with corporate buyers at scale. Among the current partners are 1,600 hospitality venues including some of the largest and most decorated hospitality groups like Altamarea Group, Che Fico, Gracious Hospitality, JKS, The Mina Group, MML, Nobu, Riviera Dining Group, Tao Group Hospitality, Unapologetic Foods, Bacchus Management Group, Wish You Were Here, and Wolfgang Puck. Over 93,000 entertainment venues are on Ande’s network today.

“Our programs are high stakes and high visibility, with our executive leadership team and key customers at the core of each event we host,” said Vicky Chung, Director of Corporate Events at Netskope. “My team and I trust Ande’s platform, and especially the team behind it. I have real-time visibility into what’s happening across every event, and when I need something done right, I know it will be. My team is now focused on reaching the executives that matter and scaling the program vs. worrying about the logistics.”

“Entertainment is every enterprise’s biggest expense line that is not yet well managed. For that reason, there are financial inefficiencies and a poor experience,” notes Arif Janmohamed, Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Co-Founder of Duration Ventures. “Ande is the connective tissue, the perfect handshake between corporations and venues. Lohit is an exceptional founder, and the size of the market opportunity is largely unbounded.”

Redpoint Ventures Managing Director Alex Bard notes, “Particularly when we invest in an early-stage company, our confidence has everything to do with the founder and their ambition. Lohit has both startup DNA and the enterprise experience to solve this problem. His vision for Ande is bold and ambitious.”

About Ande

Ande is the AI-native network for corporate entertainment. Over 60 enterprises, including Cloudflare, Salesforce, and McGraw Hill already book, manage, and measure every experience through Ande, moving more than $400 million a year through a network of 93,000 entertainment providers across 90+ cities. For the vendors on the other side of the transaction, Ande is the dedicated corporate channel that’s never existed. Learn more at ande.ai.

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Ascensus Appoints John Shapiro as Chief Product Officer

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Experienced product leader to help strengthen client-centered innovation and advance the company’s next phase of growth

DRESHER, Pa., Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Ascensus, the engine at the center of America’s savings ecosystem, today announced that John Shapiro has joined the company as Chief Product Officer and a member of the executive leadership team. Reporting directly to CEO Nick Good, Shapiro will shape Ascensus’ enterprise-wide product vision and strengthen how the company develops and delivers products, makes decisions, and sets priorities across the business.

As Ascensus continues to enhance the client experience and position the company for its next phase of growth, strong product leadership will play an increasingly important role in helping connect client insights, business priorities, and technology to create more integrated solutions and better outcomes. Shapiro will lead the Product organization and help foster unified, client-focused, and outcome-oriented approaches to product development across the enterprise.

“Ascensus has tremendous momentum, and we’re investing in the capabilities that will help drive our next phase of growth,” said Nick Good, CEO of Ascensus. “Delivering an exceptional client experience is central to that strategy. We want to make it easier for clients and partners to do business with us while creating more connected solutions and better outcomes. John brings a powerful combination of client focus, product leadership, and business acumen, and I’m excited about the impact he will have as we continue to grow and evolve.”

“Ascensus stands out for its clear purpose, talented team, and unique position in the market,” said John Shapiro. “I’m thrilled to join the company at such an important time and help build on its strong foundation by creating solutions and experiences that deliver greater value for clients, partners, and savers.”

Shapiro joins Ascensus from Lightspeed Commerce, where he served as Chief Product Officer. Earlier in his career, he held product leadership roles at Wayfair, Intuit, and Adobe Systems. Throughout his career, he has built and led large-scale product organizations, bringing new ideas to market and helping businesses serving millions of users accelerate growth.

Shapiro earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.

About Ascensus
Ascensus is the engine at the center of America’s savings ecosystem. The company makes saving easier by bringing together intuitive technology, AI, and high-touch service to support better financial outcomes for savers, small- to mid-sized businesses, state governments, and leading corporations and financial institutions. Ascensus offers comprehensive qualified and nonqualified retirement plan solutions, third-party retirement plan administration, 529 education and ABLE savings program administration, corporate- and bank-owned life insurance solutions, as well as fiduciary and total rewards services. The company supports over 16 million savers1 and oversees more than $1.3 trillion in assets under administration2 as of August 3, 2026. For more information, visit ascensus.com.

1 Figure includes American Trust Retirement recordkeeping participants
2 Figure includes AmericanTCS AUA

Contact:
Greg Winter, SVP of Communications, Ascensus
gregory.winter@ascensus.com

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SOURCE Ascensus

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