Milwaukee – September 18, 2026 -- The Doula Alliance of Arkansas (DA-AR) has secured $860,500 through Arkansas' Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) to place ten certified community-based doulas inside rural clinic care teams, using a coordination platform built by MySwaddle, a maternal health technology company developed by Holista.
Stockholm – September 18, 2026 -- Only 43% of shoppers believe AI will make their holiday shopping easier this year, down from 48% in 2025, according to new research from Sinch AB (publ) covering 2,501 consumers across eight markets ahead of Black Friday and the holiday season.
While overall optimism about AI declined, confidence surges when AI is assigned a concrete function. 81% of shoppers trust an AI assistant to handle order tracking and shipping updates, and 74% trust it for pre-purchase questions. That confidence drops to 66% for account changes and 62% for payment or billing changes.
London – – September 18, 2026 -- Naviq, the travel-focused AI company spun out of IBS Group in July 2026 with a $500 million investment and 2,000 employees, has been named a Horizon 2: Enterprise Innovator by HFS Research.
The analyst firm credited Naviq's specialist focus on aviation, hospitality, cruise and airport operations for its ability to deliver measurable transformation outcomes rather than experimental AI pilots. Melissa Fersht, Executive Research Leader at HFS Research, said IBS Group is shifting the travel industry from AI experimentation to AI execution, and that Naviq's combination of domain expertise and technical delivery forms a differentiator few providers can match.
Singapore – September 18, 2026 -- UROVO has introduced UPad, a commercial tablet designed to consolidate payment processing, barcode scanning, RFID tracking, and enterprise mobility into a single device for frontline business operations.
The device targets retail, restaurant, hospitality, and warehousing operators seeking to cut hardware investment while gaining real-time operational visibility. UROVO CTO Zhang Bo said frontline operations now require more than standalone devices, positioning UPad as a unified answer to payment, data capture, mobility, and business applications.
London – September 18, 2026 -- Undiluted, a new specialist media and intelligence platform, has launched to track the global venture debt and growth credit market, aiming to bring transparency to a sector its founder describes as fragmented and inconsistently labelled.
Undiluted covers debt financing for technology and growth companies worldwide, spanning venture debt, growth credit and other structured lending formats. The London-headquartered platform has launched with global news and deal coverage, alongside resources for founders and finance leaders navigating lender selection.
Paris – September 18, 2026 -- Allied Telesis will present its Unified Management Platform at NRF Europe 2026, targeting a retail sector where point-of-sale downtime costs the average merchant $4,700 per minute.
The company said network infrastructure failures are the root cause of 53 percent of all point-of-sale system downtime. On Black Friday, that outage cost climbs to $9,000 per minute, raising the stakes for retailers running AI-powered fitting rooms, cloud applications and connected in-store devices.
Aarhus, Denmark – September 18, 2026 -- Bygma, one of the Nordic region's largest building materials distributors, has selected Stibo Systems to build a single governed source of truth for its product master data across six countries.
The company sells and distributes construction products to professional contractors and private customers through an extensive branch network spanning the six markets. Managing that scale requires handling large volumes of product documentation, certifications and sustainability data across multiple regulatory regimes and sales channels.
Hannover, Germany – September 18, 2026 -- Geotab Inc. has launched a new suite of fleet safety tools, including a unified incident-investigation system, as 95% of European fleet professionals say collision risk has risen over the past five years, according to a Geotab survey.
San Antonio – September 18, 2026 -- Frost & Sullivan has named TrueFoundry the recipient of its 2026 Global Enterprise AI Control Plane Transformational Innovation Leadership Recognition, citing the company's unified platform for governing, securing, and scaling enterprise AI deployments.
The research firm evaluated multiple vendors across Transformational Innovation and Customer Impact benchmarks before identifying TrueFoundry as the category leader. Arun Prasath, Principal Consultant at Frost & Sullivan, said the platform's unified operational layer combines governance, security, observability, optimization, and agent lifecycle management across an organization's entire AI portfolio.
Beijing – September 18, 2026 -- Orange Lion Sports, a company founded by Alibaba Group, unveiled Smartshot 2.0, an upgraded AI sports technology platform, at the Sports Services exhibition during the 2026 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS), held September 9-13 in Beijing.
The upgraded electronic line calling system uses a six-camera Hawk-Eye setup to deliver instant in/out calls on a large screen as soon as a ball lands, with adjustable audio announcements. The company positions the technology as a low-cost alternative for amateur tournaments that eliminates the need for additional line-judge labor.