Klein will lead Zum’s software-only business as the company’s unified, AI-powered Zum CMX solution expands nationwide, reimagining student mobility for 6,500+ schools

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Zūm, a leader in student mobility, today announced the appointment of Matthew Klein as Vice President of Software Sales, strengthening its team as Zum scales its AI-powered Zum CMX™ solution nationwide.

Some of the largest school districts in the country, including Boston Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified School District and Virginia Beach City Public Schools, have chosen Zum CMX to modernize their in-house student mobility operations and improve reliability, visibility and the experience for families. As more districts look to modernize their in-house operations, Zum CMX provides the technology and intelligence designed to deliver a safer, more reliable and efficient student mobility experience. Reliable student mobility starts with Zum CMX.

“Zum CMX was built from the ground up for one purpose: transforming student mobility,” said Ritu Narayan, Founder and CEO of Zum. “We built the entire platform around the unique complexities of getting students to and from school. With every new district we serve, our technology gets smarter, learning from an increasingly large and diverse mobility network. That singular focus on student mobility is what makes Zum CMX fundamentally different and has created tremendous momentum for the business. We are excited to have Matt join the team to build on that momentum and help scale Zum CMX to districts across the country.”

Prior to Zum, Klein spent eight years building and leading Coursera’s government business, scaling it to help governments reskill citizens and public workforces. He began his career in public health with the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Klein holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and a BA in Political Science from Haverford College.

“I come from an EdTech background, and Zum’s mission immediately resonated with me,” Klein said. “Reliable student mobility is fundamental to access to education, and Zum has built technology that is dramatically improving the experience for students, families and school districts while making the underlying system more efficient. I’m excited to help scale Zum CMX so districts across the country can benefit from a fundamentally better way to deliver student mobility.”

Zum CMX is a unified, AI-powered system purpose-built for student mobility, connecting routing, dispatch, drivers, schools, families, safety and operations in real time. Rather than layering technology onto fragmented legacy systems, CMX provides districts with a single connected platform to optimize resources and deliver greater visibility, coordination and accountability across their mobility networks.

Today, Zum supports more than 6,500 schools across 19 states, with partnerships spanning many of the nation’s largest school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, San Francisco Unified, Seattle Public Schools, Oakland Unified, Boston Public Schools, the School District of Philadelphia, Omaha Public Schools and St. Louis Public Schools. Zum’s continued investment in CMX and software leadership reflects its next phase of growth: bringing the technology powering its nationwide mobility network to more districts across the country.

To learn more about how Zum is leading the nation in redefining student mobility, visit www.ridezum.com.

About Zum

Zum is redefining mass mobility with Zum CMX, which connects and coordinates people, vehicles, and operations in real time. In the student mobility market, Zum is addressing a daily source of anxiety and disruption by providing a reliable, transparent, and efficient mobility experience for students and families. Learn more at www.ridezum.com. Today, more than 6,500 schools in 19 states have relied on the Zum CMX™ system.

Media Contact

Jenny Mayfield
VP, Communications, Zum

press@ridezum.com 

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SOURCE Zūm

NEW YORK, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Accrete, the cognitive infrastructure company building Knowledge Engines for autonomous work, today announced that it has been awarded a sole-source contract by the U.S. Marine Corps to deliver Argus for Cognitive Advantage.

The award was made on a sole-source basis. Under the award, Accrete will license its Expert AI Agents to the U.S. Marine Corps to help achieve cognitive advantage, enabling more informed, confident decisions.

Adversaries increasingly compete below the threshold of armed conflict, using coordinated narratives, synthetic media, and inauthentic amplification to shape perceptions faster than human analysts can track. Rather than treating open-source data as a search problem, Argus for Cognitive Advantage tracks, analyzes, and visualizes narrative development across the complete information environment — OSINT, open web, social media, broadcast media, messaging platforms, and foreign-language outlets. Accrete’s Knowledge Engine platform, which powers the Expert AI Agent Argus for Cognitive Advantage, converts the institutional knowledge of experienced practitioners into expert AI agents that surface the most relevant, use-case-specific signals across every accessible network. This significantly reduces analytic time and produces the detailed reporting required for timely decision-making.

In a world driven by visual media, rapid analysis is paramount — and this is where Argus for Cognitive Advantage’s video vision stands out. It reduces hours of video content to analysis in minutes, transcribing and translating speech, detecting objects and scene content, and inferring location cues — turning clips that once had to be watched end to end into searchable, attributable evidence, including video posted in languages the analyst does not read.

Additional product capabilities include:

Narrative intelligence. Narrative engines, stance detection, and predictive simulation track how conversations evolve and resonate.Audience simulation. The Audience Simulation Agent segments an audience and simulates how each segment will react to a message before it is released, compressing a weeks-long analytic task into a single workflow.Measures of effectiveness. Automated assessments quantify mission outcomes.Global reach. Real-time translation and transcription across 243 languages, spanning sources including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Telegram, Weibo, and VKontakte.Argus Chat. Analysts query the data in plain language.Trusted AI by design. Every inference is traceable to its source, within auditable, accreditation-ready boundaries.

“Cognitive advantage is a warfighting requirement, not a support function, and this award reflects the Marine Corps’ clear recognition of that,” said Bill Wall, CEO of Accrete AI Government. “Furthermore, this sole-source award demonstrates the trust Accrete has built across the Department of War services. Accrete is proud to expand its reach within the Department of War by supporting the U.S. Marine Corps.”

Accrete first deployed Argus with the Department of War in 2022, followed by a multi-million dollar U.S. Army contract in 2024 to advance the capability for Army information operations. Argus for Cognitive Advantage was selected for a 2025 AFWERX STRATFI award to transition its technology from prototype to operational use.

“Knowledge Engines are dynamic context recorders, and the advantage begins the moment an organization presses record. The most valuable context in any institution is the know-how trapped in the heads of its best people. Organizations that never capture it are ceding compounding advantage to adversaries and competitors that do. Argus for Cognitive Advantage is one of the most sophisticated applications of the Knowledge Engine platform, and Accrete is proud to extend it to the Marine Corps as it counters adversaries operating against the United States every day through digital channels,” said Prashant Bhuyan, Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Accrete, Inc.

About Accrete

Accrete builds cognitive infrastructure for government and enterprise customers. Founded in 2017, Accrete’s Knowledge Engine platform unifies fragmented systems, siloed data, tacit knowledge, and decision-making into a continuously learning universal system of intelligence. Knowledge Engines give agents the shared context to reason, collaborate, decide, and act across the full complexity of an organization. As AI makes intelligence abundant, judgment is the scarce resource, and Accrete’s Knowledge Engines encode the expert judgment organizations accumulate over decades so agents can be trusted with consequential decisions. Accrete’s customers span Fortune 500 enterprises as well as U.S. defense and national security agencies. From commercial operations to national security missions, Accrete’s platform enables expert agents that deliver superintelligence purpose-built for high-stakes environments. Accrete AI Government LLC, based in Alexandria, VA, is the federal subsidiary of New York-based Accrete, Inc.

Media Contact
Megan Thatford
Accrete
megan.thatford@accrete.ai

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SOURCE Accrete

WASHINGTON, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. released the following statement today:

“The firing of Erik Slavin, editor of Stars and Stripes, is another brazen attempt by the Pentagon to dictate coverage of the military and should be immediately reversed. 

Firing a newspaper editor after he publicly defended his newsroom’s editorial independence is deeply troubling, and it should concern every journalist and every member of the U.S. military who depends on independent reporting. 

This is an assault on the fundamental principle that journalists must be free to report the news without fear of retaliation from the government officials they cover. The Pentagon must reaffirm that principle and make clear that Stars and Stripes journalists will not be punished for doing their jobs.

Today’s action comes on the heels of Stars and Stripes’ publisher Max Lederer’s resignation announcement, in which he asserted his values and understanding of the mission of the outlet “differ in fundamental ways from the direction of the leadership of the Department of Defense.” The Defense Department also sent him a separation notice today.

This disturbing pattern follows the firing in April of the global news organization’s ombudsman, a role established and charged by Congress to provide independent oversight and protect the paper’s editorial integrity, and a March memo that asserted content restrictions and expanded Pentagon oversight of the newsroom. 

For more than 150 years, Stars and Stripes has served a unique and vital role: delivering independent, fact-based reporting to U.S. service members, many serving our country far from their homes and in harm’s way.

In firing the editor of Stars and Stripes, Pentagon leadership is making clear their view that the newsroom should exist not as an independent outlet whose reporting serves to benefit U.S. troops, but as a mouthpiece to parrot Pentagon talking points. 

Our service members deserve news and information they can trust, not narratives that are shaped solely by their own employer. Our military — and the public — deserve better.”

About the National Press Club

Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. With 2,500 members, the Club is a leading voice for press freedom in the U.S. and worldwide.

Contact: Dan Griffin, Communications Director of the National Press Club, media@press.org. 

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SOURCE National Press Club