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AblePay Health Raises $20 Million Series A to Accelerate Growth and Expand Healthcare Affordability Solutions

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F-Prime leads financing, with participation from A1 Health Ventures and .406 Ventures, to help AblePay reach more health systems and patients nationwide

ALLENTOWN, Pa., Oct. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — AblePay Health (“AblePay”), a healthcare affordability company focused on helping patients better manage out-of-pocket medical costs while improving payment performance for providers, today announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing led by F-Prime, with participation from A1 Health Ventures and .406 Ventures.

The investment will support AblePay’s continued growth, deepen its technology platform, and expand the company’s services for both patients and providers as it positions itself at the forefront of solving healthcare’s affordability challenges.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Americans paid $591 billion out of pocket for healthcare in 2025, an increase of 6% from the prior year. For patients, rising costs can make an already complicated healthcare experience even harder to manage. For providers, more of the revenue they have earned depends on the patient’s ability and willingness to pay, making the financial experience increasingly important to both the patient relationship and revenue cycle performance.

“Healthcare affordability affects both sides of the bill,” said John Fistner, Founder and CEO of AblePay Health. “Patients need a better way to manage the cost of care, and providers need a better way to collect the revenue they have already earned. AblePay was designed to address those needs and ten years later, that is what still drives us.

Today, only a fraction of that burden is served by any third-party financing solution, leaving millions of patients and the health systems that treat them, exposed to an escalating, largely unaddressed problem. This investment gives us the opportunity to reach more health systems, help more patients, and continue building on a model that works for both.”

Using a proprietary technology-enabled platform, AblePay uniquely and seamlessly integrates with healthcare providers to guarantee non-recourse payment on an accelerated, predictable timeline. Enrolled patients receive flexible payment options with the opportunity to save on their out-of-pocket responsibility with free access to AblePay’s Advocacy Team to assist with billing questions or issues.

AblePay is redefining what a modern, technology-driven approach to patient financial engagement can look like.

“AblePay has built a differentiated model that addresses a significant market pain point for both healthcare providers and patients,” said Nikhil Marathe, Principal at F-Prime. “The company combines a compelling patient value proposition with meaningful financial and operational benefits for healthcare organizations. We are excited to partner with John and the AblePay team alongside A1 Health Ventures and .406 Ventures as the company enters its next stage of growth.”

The investment comes as AblePay enters its second decade of growth. The additional capital will help the company expand its reach, strengthen its capabilities, and continue developing solutions that make the healthcare payment experience simpler and more affordable for patients while delivering stronger financial outcomes for providers.

About AblePay Health

AblePay Health is a healthcare affordability and patient engagement company dedicated to helping patients save on out-of-pocket medical expenses while supporting health systems and providers with improved revenue performance and higher patient satisfaction. Founded in 2016, AblePay partners with healthcare organizations to simplify the payment experience while addressing the affordability challenges facing both patients and providers.

Learn more at ablepayhealth.com.

About F-Prime

F-Prime is a leading global venture capital firm that creates and invests in healthcare and technology companies, partnering with entrepreneurs to build groundbreaking businesses. For more than 50 years, the firm has invested across therapeutics, medtech, healthtech / services and technology, helping turn innovative ideas into transformative companies and products. F-Prime combines capital with the insight, domain expertise and relationships of its investors, engineers, operators, doctors and scientists to help its companies navigate complex challenges and make a transformative impact.

Learn more at fprimecapital.com.

About A1 Health Ventures

A1 Health Ventures is a Chicago-based venture capital firm investing in healthcare technology and technology-enabled services businesses that solve the healthcare industry’s most pressing challenges. Backed by health system LPs operating 110+ hospitals & serving over 15M patients annually, A1 leverages deep healthcare expertise and an expansive provider network to help its companies accelerate adoption and drive meaningful real-world impact.

Learn more at a1healthventures.com.

About .406 Ventures

.406 Ventures is a Boston-based venture capital firm with over $1.3B under management and two decades of experience leading or co-leading early-stage investments in pioneering healthcare, data + AI, and cybersecurity companies founded by visionary entrepreneurs.

Learn more at 406ventures.com.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ablepay-health-raises-20-million-series-a-to-accelerate-growth-and-expand-healthcare-affordability-solutions-302901811.html

SOURCE Ablepay Health, LLC

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‘Kung fu tea’: US journalist Douglas’ journey into the art of Wuyi rock tea

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BEIJING, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — A news report from chinadaily.com.cn:

Three hundred years ago, a British man stole the seeds of Wuyi rock tea to plant them elsewhere. Three centuries later, US journalist Douglas travels to Xiamei village at the foot of Wuyi Mountain in Fujian province to learn the age-old craft.

After the entire experience, he understands why people call it “kung fu tea”. For him, picking tea requires “eagle claw skills” and shaking the leaves demands “tai chi hands”. Every step is filled with a sense of mastery and dedication.

Why did Douglas travel all the way to Xiamei village to learn the art of tea-making? What are his insights on the 13,000 km Tea Road? Watch the video to find out.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kung-fu-tea-us-journalist-douglas-journey-into-the-art-of-wuyi-rock-tea-302903196.html

SOURCE chinadaily.com.cn

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IQuest-Q1 Draws Early Developer Attention Across Coding and Agentic Workflows

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BEIJING, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — IQuest-Q1 has drawn early praise from developers and industry watchers since launch, particularly for its performance on coding, software engineering, interactive application generation, and long-horizon agentic workloads.

The model weights and technical materials are publicly available:

GitHub — GitHub – IQuestLab/IQuest-Q1Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/IQuestLab/IQuest-Q1Blog — https://iquestlab.github.io/

IQuest-Q1 is trained for the work developers actually do: navigating a repository, driving a terminal, calling tools, holding a long context in mind, and finishing multi-step tasks without losing the thread. Reasoning, tool use, long-context understanding, and multi-step execution were part of the training objective from the start — not adapted afterward.

Early external discussion has begun to explore IQuest-Q1’s capabilities. One highlighted its evaluation across application building, 3D spatial generation, code diagnosis and repair, and complex tool-assisted workflows, while another publicly shared use case described turning a written product brief into an interactive SaaS analytics dashboard. A third-party technical overview examined the sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, integration with Claude Code and Codex CLI, and the infrastructure requirements of self-hosting a 320B-parameter model.

These early observations align with IQuest Research’s official demonstrations, which show IQuest-Q1 working across interactive application generation, code debugging, and multi-step tool use.

One-shot interactive applications

From a natural-language prompt, IQuest-Q1 emits runnable interactive apps in a single pass.

An FPS game. In one generation, the model produces the 3D scene, character movement, health, scoring, mode switching, and an in-game shop for resources and gear — code, file layout, interaction logic, and visuals in the same pass.

A racing game. Continuous scene extension — track geometry, foreground/background transitions — is where one-shot generations usually fall apart. IQuest-Q1 handles this class of spatially continuous, interaction-heavy app without special prompting.

Debugging a real RL run

IQuest-Q1 will also drop into an existing codebase and training stack and fix what’s actually wrong.

An RL run went off the rails. Starting from the training curves, the model pulled logs and execution traces, reasoned back through likely causes, and localized the bug in code. After the patch and a restart, it read the new metrics and confirmed recovery.

The root cause: a stray space had been inserted into the training trajectory. Removed, metrics came back up.

Multi-step work in a real environment

Given a workspace with heterogeneous information and tools, IQuest-Q1 runs multi-step tasks — reading, calling tools, and correcting itself as new information lands. In office settings it works across chat, cloud docs, spreadsheets, and comment threads, pulling context together into analysis, drafts, and revisions that are ready to hand off.

Architecture

The architecture and training approach behind these capabilities are outlined below.

Decoder-only Transformer with a sparse Mixture-of-Experts feed-forward. ~320B total parameters, ~15B active per token.

Training runs in three stages — pre-training, mid-training, post-training — bringing up code fluency first, then extending into longer, harder tasks.

Post-training focuses on software engineering, long-horizon agentic tasks, and general reasoning, using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. On top of that, Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) consolidates strengths from several teachers on the student’s own on-policy rollouts, so the student picks up capability without inheriting any one teacher’s bias profile.

Validated updates, datasets, and workflows feed into the next iteration. Pipelines, training configs, eval harnesses, and tooling are versioned and reused — capability work and infrastructure work compound instead of getting rebuilt each cycle.

Evaluations

IQuest-Q1 posts balanced results across benchmarks covering code, software engineering, terminal use, tool use, and agentic tasks:

NL2Repo — repository-level code generationCyberGym — cybersecurityTerminal-Bench 2.1 — terminal operationDeepSWE v1.1 — long-horizon codingJobBench — professional office workflows

Full numbers, baselines, and evaluation setup are in the technical report.

IQuest-Q1 was developed by IQuest Research. Developers and research teams interested in participating in upcoming early-access testing programs can apply for trial access via email: research@iquestlab.com 

CONTACT: 
IQuest Research
research@iquestlab.com 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iquest-q1-draws-early-developer-attention-across-coding-and-agentic-workflows-302903211.html

SOURCE IQuest Research

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INFiLED Launches NX Series for Stage Productions

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SHENZHEN, China, Oct. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — INFiLED, launched the NX Series in early October, a heavy-duty rental LED solution for stage productions. Developed for live events, touring productions, outdoor festivals and temporary indoor or outdoor installations, NX Series is designed for projects where LED systems must hold large structures, shift between stage forms and keep onsite work moving under tight schedules.

Recent INFiLED rental projects place the release in a real production context. Shenzhen Happy Valley‘s outdoor summer festival stage showed the scale of a layered five-screen rental layout, while UMK2026‘s live stage production reflected the precision required for large-format screens and overhead LED elements. Together, they point to stage environments where larger visual surfaces, dimensional design and tighter onsite schedules now converge.

NX is introduced for this kind of stage work, where creative direction and technical execution need to stay aligned from load-in to show time. The platform brings structural capacity, multi-form configuration, rental-ready protection, faster service and stable visual performance into the same system.

Larger Stages Ask More of the System

Large stage displays now do more than fill a background. They shape the scene, define depth and often become part of the performance architecture. Before content appears on screen, the LED structure has already passed through transport, lifting, alignment, rehearsal and operation.

NX is specified for stacking and hanging up to 20 m, with optional wind-resistant braces and locks for demanding sites. That capacity matters for large suspended or stacked LED structures, especially in outdoor environments where structural planning carries the whole production.

The cabinet design follows the same logic. A dual-layer magnesium cabinet keeps panels lighter in handling while retaining the rigidity needed for alignment, with cabinet weights of 6.8 kg and 10.9 kg across its two cabinet options. Top quick locks and bottom alignment pins support faster connection and more consistent geometry as the screen grows.

Creative Forms Need Repeatable Mechanics

Stage design rarely stays within a flat rectangle. Productions move between curves, staggered layers, stepped contours, wraparound corners and compact scenic structures. In rental work, those forms need to return accurately across different venues, crews and schedules.

NX supports flat displays, curved layouts, staggered and stepped surfaces, and heart-shaped creative forms. With NX Edge, the system forms 90° curved transitions for wraparound content. In selected configurations, NX also works with MC Series for right-angle and cube structures, and with Xmk3 Series for larger curved forms.

For precision curves, NX offers a –10° to +15° range in 2.5° steps. The degree-based adjustment gives designers room to shape the stage while giving technicians a clear mechanical reference during installation and repeat use.

Onsite Workflow Shapes the Final Image

A strong stage image depends on work the audience never sees. Load-in, locking, alignment, cabling, service and rehearsal all influence whether the screen stays on schedule and performs cleanly when the show begins.

NX addresses those pressure points through several rental-focused details:

Top quick locks and bottom alignment pins support faster assembly and consistent screen geometry.The unified integrated PDU centralizes power and signal distribution, reducing cabling complexity across the system.Optional clip-on masks for outdoor configurations reduce disassembly steps during onsite service.Outdoor versions feature full encapsulation and IP65-rated protection for exposed environments.

Visual performance remains part of the same production path. Outdoor stages need brightness that stays clear in stronger ambient light, so NX reaches up to 5,000 nits outdoors. A 7,680 Hz refresh rate supports smoother motion and camera capture, while 16-bit grayscale and a 10,000:1 contrast ratio preserve tonal control, depth and clarity for stage content.

NX Series expands INFiLED’s rental LED portfolio with a heavier-duty option for stage production applications where scale, form and timing carry equal weight. For INFiLED, whose work spans rental, fixed-installation and commercial display environments, the release adds another layer to its engineering focus – LED systems shaped around the conditions of real projects, not only around the appearance of the screen.

For stage teams, that focus matters most when the technology fades into the work. The structure holds, the workflow keeps moving and the image reaches the audience as intended.

Website: www.infiled.com
Contact: info@infiled.com

SOURCE INFiLED

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