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Sopris Capital Acquires Blackford Analysis, Strengthening AI Orchestration Capabilities Across Its HealthTech Portfolio

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Acquisition of the AI imaging orchestration pioneer expands Sopris Capital’s healthcare technology platform and reinforces its commitment to end-to-end, AI-enabled patient care

MIAMI, Oct. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Sopris Capital, a multi-strategy investment firm with a deep and growing portfolio of healthcare technology companies, today announced it has completed the acquisition of Blackford Analysis from Bayer. Blackford is a pioneer in AI orchestration for medical imaging, with its platform deployed by leading original equipment manufacturers and hospitals across various world markets. Sopris is in the process of combining Blackford under one of Sopris’s top performing portfolio companies, Azra AI, and this next step is expected to be completed in the coming days/weeks. Blackford will continue to operate as a separate legal entity following the combination with operations in Scotland and the United States and will continue to serve its existing OEM partners and health system customers with no disruption to current deployments or operations. Once this combination is completed, a further announcement will be made.

Founded in 2010, Blackford launched the industry’s first AI orchestration platform in 2016 and has since become a trusted infrastructure partner for radiology departments seeking to evaluate, deploy, and manage AI imaging applications at scale. The Blackford Platform has a portfolio of more than 130 AI applications from over 45 partner vendors, giving health systems a single, vendor-neutral way to bring best of breed AI into the imaging workflow without disrupting existing operations.

Azra AI, is a leading healthcare AI platform built to identify, connect, and manage patients with cancer and other complex illnesses across the care journey, and ensures they stay on the right path from suspicion through survivorship — Blackford’s capabilities allow Azra AI to go even further upstream with their customers with any AI imaging algorithm. The addition of Blackford reflects Sopris Capital’s continued investment in AI-enabled healthcare technology and its broader thesis around supporting more connected, longitudinal patient care.

“Blackford has spent over a decade building the infrastructure that healthcare AI depends on, and this acquisition reflects our conviction in that vision,” said Abinav Sankar, Managing Partner at Sopris Capital. “As we continue to build out a healthcare technology portfolio focused on connected, longitudinal patient care, Blackford gives us a critical foothold at the very beginning of that journey, the moment an image is captured and analyzed. Combining with Azra AI, we are positioning our portfolio to support patients from first scan through survivorship.”

“Joining Sopris Capital creates an exciting opportunity to accelerate Blackford’s growth and extend the reach of our platform,” said James Holroyd, Blackford Managing Director. “With Sopris’s support and complementary healthcare technology portfolio, we can both broaden and deepen our work with customers, channel partners and AI vendors while continuing to make the adoption of medical imaging AI simpler, scalable and more effective.”

The acquisition marks Sopris Capital’s latest step in building a healthcare technology portfolio focused on the future of AI-enabled patient care.

About Sopris Capital

Sopris Capital is a multi-strategy investment firm with long-term strategic capital, giving it the flexibility and agility to act quickly and deploy its knowledge, networks, and expertise in support of its portfolio companies. Sopris Capital partners closely with management teams to accelerate growth and create long-term value. With more than two decades of experience, Sopris Capital invests across venture capital, private equity, and real estate, with a concentrated focus on healthcare services, healthcare technology, and technology-enabled B2B businesses. The firm maintains a deep portfolio of healthcare technology companies, including Azra AI. Sopris Capital has offices in Colorado and Florida. For more information, visit sopriscapital.com.

About Blackford Analysis

Founded in 2010, Blackford Analysis is a pioneer in AI orchestration for medical imaging. The Blackford Platform enables healthcare organizations to evaluate, deploy, manage, and support AI imaging applications at enterprise scale. Blackford’s technology is deployed by leading original equipment manufacturers and hospitals across various world markets, helping radiology departments improve diagnostic confidence, streamline workflows, and expand access to AI without disrupting existing clinical operations. For more information, visit blackfordanalysis.com.

Media Contact:

Abinav Sankar

ASankar@sopriscapital.com

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SOURCE Sopris Capital

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HeyGen Launches HeyGen Voice, Debuting at #1 on Artificial Analysis’ Leaderboard

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HeyGen Supports High-Quality, Identity-Secure Video Content Creation for Creators and Businesses at Scale

HeyGen Voice Delivers Authentic, Natural Output That Sounds Like the User’s Real Voice

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — HeyGen, the world’s leading personal avatar company, today launched HeyGen Voice, its new in-house voice model. HeyGen Voice debuts at #1 on Artificial Analysis’ Leaderboard, earning the top ranking as the world’s best model in independent evaluations of AI voice models, and marking a major milestone for HeyGen’stechnology.

The launch expands HeyGen’s work to make high-quality video creation available to people and businesses that increasingly rely on content creation for their digital presence. A recent HeyGen survey of more than 1,000 small business owners in its global user base found that 71.6% had recorded a video for their business and ultimately decided not to post it. HeyGen Voice helps alleviate issues of production quality or having a lack of confidence in front of the camera.

Many AI voice models lack components like emphasis, emotion, and timing, that make a voice identifiable and compelling, and listeners lose interest right away. HeyGen Voice is built for authentic performance, keeping the tone, pacing and expression of a person’s voice so that every line comes across the way they would actually deliver it.

“Voice is one of the most powerful and personal ways we communicate, and quality makes all the difference,” said Rong Yan, CTO of HeyGen. “We built HeyGen Voice to deliver the best possible AI voice that technology can deliver; one that always sounds like you at your best. Debuting at #1 on Artificial Analysis is independent proof that you don’t have to trade authenticity for quality.”

HeyGen Voice product highlights include:

#1 Ranked Voice Model: Top ranking on Artificial Analysis’ Leaderboard in independent evaluations of AI voice models.Authentic Delivery: Delivers natural emphasis, emotion, character and pacing, so users sound like themselves and not a synthetic copy.One End-to-End Stack: HeyGen’s Avatar V is the core model, and voice is a new format inside the same stack. Identity and voice come from one place rather than a patchwork of vendors.Free Access: HeyGen Voice is available free within the HeyGen platform and API.HeyGen Professional Voice Clone: A $99/month add-on for users who want the closest representation of their own voice. It is trained, with explicit consent, on 30 minutes to three hours of the owner’s speech.

A key component of HeyGen’s success is their ability to create products that are true to each user’s identity. As AI makes it easier to create realistic representations of people, HeyGen has made consent and control central to how its technology is built. HeyGen requires the voice owner’s explicit consent, with safeguards built into its avatar products that help ensure users remain in control of how their voice and likeness are represented.

Today’s announcement follows the recent launch of HeyGen Video and continued expansion of the company’s tools for creators and businesses. HeyGen also recently earned a Committed Badge from EcoVadis, reflecting the company’s performance across environment, labor and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement as it continues to grow its enterprise business.

Founded in 2020, HeyGen now reaches over 40 million users across 196 countries, with more than 118 million videos created and adoption across 85% of the Fortune 100. The company recently surpassed $200 million in ARR, doubling revenue in eight months.

HeyGen Voice will continue to roll out additional capabilities and updates taking into account feedback from users, as the model continues to evolve.

ABOUT HEYGEN

HeyGen is the world’s leading AI avatar company. HeyGen creates Personal Avatars — AI-powered digital versions of people that look, move, and sound like them. Featured in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2026, rated #1 most realistic on G2 and powered by its proprietary Avatar V model, HeyGen is used by over 40 million people and 85% of the Fortune 100 to create clear, confident videos without filming every one—so they can be their best self, every time.

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SOURCE HeyGen

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Siteimprove Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Accessibility

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Recognized for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Oct. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — We are excited to share that Siteimprove has been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Accessibility.

“We’re proud to be named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Accessibility. We built Siteimprove.ai for the way digital teams compete today: one agentic content intelligence platform unifying accessibility, analytics, SEO/AEO, and content strategy, extended into Claude, VS Code, Lovable, and Figma,” said Nayaki Nayyar, CEO of Siteimprove.

Get your complimentary copy of the report here.

Gartner delivers actionable, objective insight to executives and their teams. Its expert guidance and tools enable faster, smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission-critical priorities.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant evaluates vendors based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. We are honored to be included among the recognized vendors in this important report. Learn more about the Magic Quadrant.

Report citation
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Digital Accessibility, Brent Stewart, Nabeeha Ahmed, Paige Kirk, Sarah Baumunk, 6 October 2026

Disclaimer
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally. MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Media Contact:
Emily Degnan
edegnan@thebranded.agency

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SOURCE Siteimprove

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Lean SuperIntelligence (LSI) Closes Initial Financing and Announces First Self-Improving, On-Premise, Lean Cybersecurity Models Beyond Mythos™

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Self-improving cybersecurity LLMs do offense–defense interplay in customizable on-prem deployments and run at massively lower cost.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Lean SuperIntelligence (LSI) is the first AI lab to build self-improving offense and defense security LLMs that enable enterprises to stay ahead of attackers without renting out their data to the cloud. The two models improve each other: LSI-Offense-1 LLM finds, exploits, and validates vulnerabilities and LSI-Defense-1 LLM detects, investigates, and responds within minutes, not days to weeks. Inside LSI’s Cyber World Models, every attack the offense finds becomes a lesson for the defense, and every defense that holds forces the offense to find a new path, so both models keep getting better on customers’ own data. Customizable and air-gapped, they beat frontier LLMs at vulnerability discovery and threat detection, and they are lean enough to run continuously, scanning every check-in software developers make. LSI’s pre-seed round is backed by leading investors and angels who have led AI and security at OpenAI, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Zscaler, Commvault, and Gruve AI.

Outperforming frontier models on offense and defense

On independent, real-world offense security benchmarks, LSI-Offense-1 LLM significantly outperforms frontier models including Claude Mythos™, GPT-6 and Gemini-3.8-Cyber at autonomously discovering, exploiting and validating vulnerabilities. The model has already uncovered previously unknown vulnerabilities. The results show that specialized, lean cybersecurity models can exceed general-purpose frontier models.

On public defense benchmarks spanning multi-step threat detection, investigation, and response, LSI-Defense-1 LLM significantly outperforms frontier models from the same labs at a fraction of their cost, triaging alerts, correlating telemetry, and returning verdicts in seconds with far fewer false positives.

Why it matters

Attacks move in minutes. A rumoured vulnerability becomes a working exploit in under 10 minutes; defense must keep pace on every event.Enterprises want to own, not rent. Today they send code and telemetry to frontier labs, pay hundreds of millions in inference, and own nothing they learn. That’s why two-thirds of enterprises moved AI workloads back on-prem last year,[1] and sovereign cloud spending hits $80B in 2026.[2]

LSI gives enterprises self-improving security models they own.

Founded by the team behind National / Sovereign LLMs, the first AI Guardrails, AI labs at Alexa, Uber AI and Salesforce Research — and elite security experts.

Chandra Khatri, Founder and CEO of LSI, with more than 50 patents and publications, was Founding Head of AI at Krutrim, where he built India’s first sovereign LLM in 2023. He co-founded Got It AI, where he built ELMAR, the first enterprise LLM, and TruthChecker, the world’s first hallucination guardrails model (acquired). He led AI initiatives at Uber AI, Amazon Alexa AI, and eBay Research.LSI’s founding engineers have built sovereign AI and foundation models end to end, from pre-training data to production deployment to 10s of millions of users.LSI’s founding security team has discovered hundreds of critical CVEs for major organizations and national intelligence agencies.

Comments

“You cannot defend against an attack you have never seen. So we trained the Offense LLM first,” said Chandra Khatri, Founder and CEO of LSI. “Our LSI-Offense-1 LLM is built to be a generation ahead of the attacks in the wild, and our LSI-Defense-1 LLM learns from every attack LSI-Offense-1 finds. Frontier labs give everyone the same model. We provide each enterprise its own customizable model, running on-premise and trained on its own private data.”

“Chandra has spent his career building at each major wave of AI — Alexa, Uber AI, enterprise LLMs and guardrails at Got It AI, and India’s first sovereign LLM. LSI is the natural next step.” — Lu Zhang, Founder & Managing Partner, Fusion Fund

Availability

LSI-Offense-1 and LSI-Defense-1 LLMs are available now to a limited number of design partners (security vendors, MSSPs, and certain Fortune 500 enterprises) for air-gapped, on-prem, sovereign, or managed deployment. Request access at lsi.inc.

About LSI

Lean SuperIntelligence (LSI) is the first lab building self-improving offense and defense security LLMs, on the path to Security SuperIntelligence. Founded by Chandra Khatri (Krutrim, Got It AI, Amazon Alexa, Uber AI), LSI brings together sovereign and enterprise LLM builders and expert security researchers.

lsi.inc

Follow LSI: LinkedIn, X/Twitter

Claude Mythos is a trademark of Anthropic PBC. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

References

66% of enterprises repatriated AI workloads from public cloud, survey of 1,500 enterprise architects, June 2026.Worldwide sovereign cloud IaaS spending to total $80 billion in 2026, February 2026.

Media contact

media@lsi.inc

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lean-superintelligence-lsi-closes-initial-financing-and-announces-first-self-improving-on-premise-lean-cybersecurity-models-beyond-mythos-302903760.html

SOURCE LSI Inc.

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