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Giift, a leading provider of AI-powered loyalty and rewards solutions, has rebranded globally as Xoxoday.The strategic move follows a $70m investment from Apis Growth Fund II, a private equity fund managed by UK-based Apis Partners. Apis Partners is known for backing growth-stage financial services and infrastructure firms with a focus on ESG and impact-driven investments.Xoxoday specialises in employee recognition, sales incentives, and customer loyalty programmes through its comprehensive suite of SaaS solutions. The company serves over 5,000 businesses worldwide, spanning startups to Fortune 500 firms such as Western Digital, Infosys, Nestlé, Mercedes-Benz, and Adobe. Its platform supports more than 65…

Beams Fintech Fund, a prominent private equity firm focused on growth-stage FinTech and financial services companies, has confirmed its participation in a $70m funding round for its portfolio company InsuranceDekho.The round was co-led by Beams Fintech Fund alongside Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) and insurer BNP Paribas Cardif, which participated through its InsurTech fund managed by European investment firm Eurazeo.Launched in 2017 by founder Ankit Agrawal, InsuranceDekho has established itself as one of India’s leading InsurTech platforms, transforming how insurance is distributed across the country. The platform aims to make insurance more accessible to a broader population by using…

OpenAI on Monday said it is supporting a new consortium called NextGenAI that would focus on supporting AI-assisted research at top universities. NextGenAI, whose 15 founding academic partners include Harvard, the University of Oxford and MIT, will be funded with $50 million in research grants, compute funding, and API access from OpenAI, the company said. Students, educators, and researchers will be eligible to receive awards, which will be doled out over the coming months. “This initiative is built not only to fuel the next generation of discoveries, but also to prepare the next generation to shape AI’s future,” OpenAI wrote…

Tel Aviv-based Aryon Security has stepped out of stealth with $9 million seed funding raised from Viola Ventures and Blumberg Capital, and with support from angel investors Shlomo Kramer, Maty Siman, and Rubi Aronashvili. Aryon offers a Cloud Security Enforcement Platform based on the idea that prevention is better than cure. The purpose is simple: prevent misconfigurations and forgotten encryption before data is deployed to the cloud. The alternative, detect security issues after deployment, is costly, time consuming, difficult – and tempts fate. Aryon was founded by Ron Arbel (CEO), Ariel Litmanovich (CTO), and Yair Ladizhensky (VP R&D). All three…

Montreal, Canada – Just a few months ago, Canada’s governing Liberal Party seemed poised for a resounding 2025 election defeat. Opinion polls showed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s party trailing the opposition Conservatives by as many as 26 percentage points. An affordability crisis and widespread dislike of Trudeau had caused the Liberals’ support to plummet, and calls were growing for the embattled prime minister to resign ahead of a looming federal vote. Yet now, experts say the political tide is shifting due to a range of factors, including Trudeau’s decision to resign, a Liberal leadership race that has boosted the party’s momentum,…

As more people turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT to look things up on the internet, the way companies approach their online presence has to change. Scrunch AI wants to help enterprises better prepare for a world in which more AI bots and agents visit their website than humans do. Scrunch AI says its platform helps companies audit and optimize how they appear on various AI search platforms and gives them better visibility into how AI web crawlers interact with their online information. Its system updates every three days and lets companies see how their information is presented in AI…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Columbia University has become the first target in President Donald Trump’scampaign to cut federal money to colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war.Federal agencies are considering orders to stop work on $51 million in contracts with the New York City school, according to a Monday announcement from the departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration. They’re also reviewing whether Columbia should be eligible to continue receiving more than $5 billion in federal grants.Trump said on social media that federal funding will be stopped for any school or college that…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Columbia University has become the first target in President Donald Trump’scampaign to cut federal money to colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war.Federal agencies are considering orders to stop work on $51 million in contracts with the New York City school, according to a Monday announcement from the departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration. They’re also reviewing whether Columbia should be eligible to continue receiving more than $5 billion in federal grants.Trump said on social media that federal funding will be stopped for any school or college that…

The Polish space agency POLSA over the weekend announced that it has disconnected its network from the internet in response to a cyberattack. “There has been a cybersecurity incident at POLSA. In order to secure data after the hack, the POLSA network was immediately disconnected from the internet,” the agency announced on X (formerly Twitter). The agency said the incident has been reported to the relevant authorities and an investigation was launched, but shared no specific information on the type of cyberattack it fell victim to. While it is possible that POLSA was targeted by ransomware, since disconnecting systems from…

Apple device management firm Jamf announced on Monday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire identity and access management (IAM) solutions provider Identity Automation. Jamf will buy Identity Automation for roughly $215 million in cash consideration, subject to conditions. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2025. Identity Automation has developed a cloud-based IAM platform that provides identity lifecycle management, access governance, and authentication capabilities.  The company specializes in dynamic identities, which frequently change and require adjustments. For example, in the education sector, the roles of students and educators change depending…