M&A & Partnerships

Reports have emerged that Asia Aviation Public Company Limited, or AAV, is in talks with a well-known Thai marketing tycoon to take a stake in AAV alongside its major Malaysian shareholder. Sources in the capital markets say that if an agreement is reached, it would sharpen AAV's marketing strategy, because this tycoon has a proven ability to build world-class brands and strong relationships with global artists. Currently, AAV holds 100% of Thai AirAsia Company Limited, or TAA, while AirAsia Aviation Group Limited, or AAAGL, holds approximately 40.71% of AAV. If AAAGL sells part of its stake, the proceeds will not flow directly into AAV, so investors must separate AAV's financial position from that of the Malaysia-based AirAsia group. Dittanop Watthanavekin, a senior analyst at Krungsri Securities Public Company Limited, disclosed that current receivables from related parties at the end of the second quarter of 2026 stood at 14.649 billion baht, mainly ticket receivables from sales through online travel agents, or OTAs, together with the AirAsia Group, accounting for roughly 50% of total ticket sales. The credit term is about 30 days, with ticket receivables totaling 13.907 billion baht, of which approximately 7.322 billion baht is more than two months overdue. The estimated impact on share value is about 0.59 baht per share. Meanwhile, AAV is in the process of adjusting its OTA ticketing system so that ticket sale proceeds are transferred directly to AAV, with clarity expected from the end of 2026 onward. Aircraft maintenance receivables stand at 743 million baht. Analysts at Finansia Syrus Securities Public Company Limited assess that AAV's liquidity risk remains limited, with its net interest-bearing debt-to-equity ratio excluding lease liabilities at 1.06 times in the second quarter of 2026, below the bond covenant limit of no more than 3 times. AAV plans to sell about two aircraft and lease them back, expecting to raise roughly 2 billion baht in cash, and is preparing to issue a new bond worth 1.5 billion baht to replace existing bonds that are maturing. Therefore, there is no need for a capital increase under normal conditions. As for earnings, the third quarter of 2026 is expected to remain in loss due to seasonal factors, while the fourth quarter of 2026 should improve on advance bookings entering the high season. However, if jet fuel prices stay high at around 180 to 190 dollars per barrel, AAV may still not return to profit in the fourth quarter, though the loss is expected to narrow from the previous quarter. The brokerage maintains its Buy recommendation with a fair value of 1.36 baht.

NEC Corporation announced that the Ohio Attorney General's Office, through the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, is upgrading its biometric identification system to NEC's next-generation Integra-ID 7 Software-as-a-Service platform, hosted within the Microsoft Azure Government Cloud environment. The large-scale modernization project transitions the State of Ohio's existing on-premises Integra-ID MBIS environment to a fully managed SaaS architecture, began in 2026, and is anticipated to be completed in less than nine months. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation operates Ohio's Automated Biometric Identification System, known as OABIS, which today contains more than 6 million biometric records, over 41 million events associated with approximately 25 million subjects, connectivity to nearly 600 livescan systems, and integration with eight local AFIS systems and the FBI Next Generation Identification system. NEC previously deployed a successful AFIS replacement project for the State of Ohio in 2021 following a competitive procurement process, replacing both the legacy AFIS and Computerized Criminal History systems. Eugene le Roux, Senior Vice President of NEC National Security Systems, Inc., said the project reinforces NEC's commitment to helping public safety agencies adopt secure, scalable SaaS biometric solutions, with Integra-ID 7 built on NEC's SaaS platform and powered by its everBlu continuous innovation framework.

JetaBac Public Company Limited, or GTB, has secured an order for a Waste Heat Recovery Boiler from a customer in the United Kingdom. The boiler has been designed and manufactured to the European standard EN 12952, the standard for water tube boilers, under the control of PED 2014/68/EU, the European Union's mandatory safety requirements for pressure equipment and vessels. This boiler will form part of a production system in the global chemicals and renewable energy industry, which places emphasis on energy efficiency, process stability, and reducing environmental impact. JetaBac stated that this order marks another important step in elevating its capabilities in overseas markets and reaffirms its readiness to be a leader in industrial thermal energy solutions, while driving the JetaBac brand to become a leader in low-carbon thermal energy solutions.

Walmart is rolling out support for Apple Pay and Google Pay across its U.S. stores, reversing a policy under which it had promoted its own Walmart Pay solution and limited acceptance of third-party digital wallets. The support is expected to cover in-person checkout, though timing and specific rollout details are still emerging. Walmart operates a global network of retail and wholesale stores, membership clubs, ecommerce sites and mobile apps, so the decision on which digital wallets to accept affects how millions of shoppers pay at checkout. The reversal trades some control at checkout for potentially richer data and more ways to keep shoppers inside Walmart's ecosystem, feeding its push into digital commerce and higher-margin services such as Walmart+. It also brushes against a flagged risk that handing payment front-door access to Apple and Alphabet could make it harder for Walmart Connect and marketplace services to fully monetise shopper data.

Hapag-Lloyd's CEO is set to visit Israel Wednesday as the company pushes a revised offer to acquire ZIM Integrated Shipping for $4.2 billion, according to a Calcalist report. The CEO and Israeli private equity fund FIMI are seeking approval for the deal after six of Israel's eight regulators opposed the original terms, citing possible harm to ZIM's international shipping routes and financial stability. Earlier this month, Hapag-Lloyd and FIMI said they were working on a revised proposal following talks with Israeli authorities. Under the original agreement signed in February, Hapag-Lloyd agreed to acquire ZIM for $35 per share in cash, an equity value of roughly $4.2 billion, with the deal set to establish ZIM as a fully Israeli-controlled container shipping company owned by FIMI. A separate Israeli shipping business backed by FIMI Opportunity Funds would retain the ZIM brand and operate 16 vessels serving strategically important routes to Israel. ZIM shares ticked higher by 0.7% on the report.

Atropos Health announced a significant expansion of its federated Atropos Evidence Network, adding deeper collaborations with Norstella and Arcadia and new data partnership agreements with OneMedNet Corporation. The network, which comprises dozens of primary and aggregated data sources, now covers more than 330 million U.S. patients, scaled open and closed claims, and over 150 million patient EHR records including clinical notes for regulatory-grade real-world evidence applications. The expansion also adds multimodal imaging and omics data linked directly to clinical outcomes and mortality datasets, along with privacy-first cross-source linkage using proprietary de-identification technology. Atropos Health said the added scale supports regulatory-grade observational research, health economics and outcomes research, rapid commercial analytics, and AI and predictive model training, and that integrating its tools lets partner platforms run complex temporal queries up to 50 times faster and 30 times more cost-effectively than traditional data analytics methods. All integrated solutions use the company's Real World Fitness Score grading framework, and OneMedNet President and CEO Aaron Green said the partnership puts its regulatory decision-grade data directly into partners' hands as a long-term subscription collaboration.

Root, Inc. extended its exclusive embedded insurance partnership with Carvana through at least August 2028, keeping its products integrated into Carvana's vehicle-purchase experience and preserving access to the used-car platform's national buyer base at the point of sale. The extension supports Root's push beyond Direct acquisition as it broadens partnerships and independent-agent distribution; those channels represented about 51% of new writings in the second quarter of 2026, up from about 44% a year earlier, after Root reduced Direct performance marketing as competitors increased spending and lowered prices. The embedded model lets customers purchase and bind coverage within a partner experience without visiting a Root website, which could support policy growth and more efficient customer acquisition if the economics meet Root's target returns. The deal secures distribution access but does not guarantee premium growth, since results depend on Carvana's retail unit volumes and attachment rates; policies in force rose 6.2% year over year to 483,921 at the end of the second quarter, but management expects year-end 2026 policies in force to be relatively flat if current competition persists. Root currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), while its Value, Growth, Momentum and VGM scores are all A.

Omnilogy has partnered with Power by Fortra to bring its i-Rays observability platform to Fortra's customer base. According to Fortra's 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey, 69% of 315 IBM i professionals polled named skills shortages as their top concern, overtaking cybersecurity for the first time in nine years. The partnership gives Omnilogy access to Power by Fortra's established customer base and channel expertise, while Power by Fortra will provide sales, implementation, training, and technical support services, along with opportunity discovery and qualification, contract negotiation, billing, and renewals. i-Rays General Manager Marek Walczak said the alliance is built around bringing AI-powered observability to any organizations that need it, whether they are addressing skills shortages, modernizing operations, or expanding enterprise observability initiatives with platforms such as Dynatrace. Omnilogy is a privately held global technology company based in Warsaw that focuses on observability, monitoring, and cybersecurity for the IBM i and IBM Z ecosystems.

AbbVie announced that the European Commission has approved its immunology drug Rinvoq, also known as upadacitinib, for the treatment of active polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis in patients aged two years and older who have had an inadequate response or intolerance to disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs. The approval marks the 11th indication for Rinvoq in the European Union, where it can be used either as monotherapy or in combination with methotrexate, and follows the drug's existing United States approval for the same condition. The decision was supported by the open-label phase I SELECT-YOUTH study, in which 66.4% of patients achieved an ACR Pediatric 70 response at week 12, rising to 79.5% by week 48, while clinical remission increased from 23% to 43.4% over the same period. Rinvoq is a key growth driver for AbbVie, with sales up 22.2% year over year to $4.64 billion in the first half of 2026 and expected revenues of around $10.2 billion for the full year. Separately, AbbVie announced a multi-year collaboration with Iambic to accelerate discovery of small-molecule therapies in immunology, neuroscience and oncology, using Iambic's AI-powered platform including its next-generation Enchant v3 model, with Iambic receiving an upfront payment plus milestone payments and tiered royalties on net sales.

SoFi Bank N.A. and Mastercard announced on September 22 that live stablecoin settlement is now running across SoFi's debit and credit card program on Mastercard's global payments network, with SoFiUSD becoming the first stablecoin issued by a nationally chartered, FDIC-insured U.S. bank for production card-network settlement. SoFi is migrating its entire card program, expected to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume, onto blockchain rails. SoFiUSD is fully reserved, redeemable 1:1 for cash, and runs on Ethereum and Solana, and when it settles across Mastercard's Multi-Token Network the counterparty risk sits inside the federal banking perimeter rather than outside it. Mastercard expanded its stablecoin settlement support in June 2026 to include USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, and SoFiUSD side by side, while Visa has already built $20 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume on nonbank stablecoins. SoFi's Galileo technology platform is expected to extend SoFiUSD settlement to other issuing banks, and merchants get 24/7 instant settlement at zero cost through SoFi's Big Business Banking platform without holding the stablecoin themselves. The GENIUS Act enforcement cliff on January 18, 2027, and the OCC's recent pace of digital-asset bank charter approvals mean the competitive landscape is still being written.

Bankers are reaching out to investors ahead of the sale of $49 billion in financing backing Paramount Skydance Corp.'s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., after the company settled a series of lawsuits that had held up the $110 billion acquisition. Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., and Apollo Global Management Inc. underwrote one of the largest buyout debt packages on record earlier this year to fund the takeover, and lined up significant investor demand before the deal ground to a halt amid the threat of legal proceedings. The $49 billion package includes about $30 billion of investment-grade bonds, $7.5 billion of investment-grade loans and roughly $12 billion of second-lien bonds, targeting a wider range of dollar and euro investors than is typical for a leveraged buyout. The debt was structured to leave Paramount on the hook, rather than its lenders, if borrowing costs rise, with no caps on the interest rate, which should prevent a repeat of the hit banks took on so-called hung loans in 2022. Regulators in nearly 70 jurisdictions have already approved the merger, and the Federal Communications Commission and other federal agencies signed off on an extraordinary level of foreign financing, making it likely the acquisition can close very soon.

Paramount Skydance reached a settlement with California and 11 other states that had sued to block its planned purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, clearing the antitrust case that had threatened to hold up the acquisition, though the deal still awaits judicial clearance. Warner Bros. Discovery shares closed Sept. 21 at $30.80, up 10.8%, leaving them 20 cents short of the $31-per-share cash consideration Paramount would pay, while Paramount Skydance shares slumped 2.9% after initially gaining on the settlement news. The transaction values WBD at approximately $81 billion in equity value and $110 billion in enterprise value, and Paramount expects the combination to generate more than $6 billion in annual synergies within three years of closing. Under the settlement, the merged firm must release at least 30 theatrical pictures yearly in the first two years after closure and 32 annually in the next three years, with independent producers required to make a minimum of four films a year, or Paramount would pay $30 million for each picture it fails to deliver and may be forced to sell Miramax Studios. Paramount also agreed to spend at least $300 million more per year on U.S. film production, or a minimum of $1.5 billion over five years, compared with its 2025 spending level, and the settlement includes a $47.5 million worker fund and restrictions on how the combined company negotiates cable distribution. The resolution eliminates one of the largest near-term risks to the transaction's timing, as WBD shareholders are entitled to an additional $0.00277778 per share for every day after Sept. 30 until the deal closes, capped at $0.25 per 90-day period, a commitment Paramount has said is approximately $7 million a day based on WBD's share count.

Gatik, the Silicon Valley-based autonomous trucking company, secured $200 million in Series D funding in late August, a round led by Qatar Investment Authority and joined by Koch Disruptive Technology, Millennium, and Cathie Wood's Ark Invest. CEO Gautam Narang said the capital will go toward scaling the company's driverless freight network, which currently operates across Pepsi's network in three markets in Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona. Gatik has over $600 million in contracted revenue, Narang said, against a total addressable opportunity of more than $300 billion. The company's dock-to-dock delivery model moves goods from customer distribution centers to retail stores using driverless trucks running 24/7 on highways and surface streets, managed through its Gatik Omni fleet platform and a human AV interface called HAVi. Narang said Gatik aims to scale to hundreds of driverless trucks by the end of this year and thousands next year, citing strong demand from commercial partners including Pepsi.

E Tech Group announced an Authorized System Integrator Agreement with Rainbow Robotics that expands its collaborative robotics offering across the United States. Under the agreement, E Tech Group serves as a Servicing System Integrator for Rainbow Robotics' collaborative robot lineup, deploying and integrating the robots in laboratory and industrial automation applications including machine tending, welding, palletizing, inspection, and assembly. Rainbow Robotics offers collaborative robot models for laboratory, life sciences, and food and beverage environments, including NSF/ANSI 169-certified models with IP66 protection and full-aluminum construction for hygienic and washdown applications, plus a dedicated welding interface with built-in weaving patterns. E Tech Group will provide installation at customer sites and first-level service, including authorized warranty-related support, and for laboratory automation projects it supplies robotic workcell integration, connectivity among laboratory instruments, schedulers and LIMS platforms, controls and data integration, and validation and documentation support. Luke Jung, Director of Rainbow Robotics USA, said E Tech Group's systems integration expertise, particularly in laboratory automation, made it a natural fit, while Sura Hadi, Director of Lab Automation and Industrial Robotics at E Tech Group, said the addition gives customers greater flexibility to select the right technology for their application.

WisdomAI announced that its Agentic Analytics platform is now embedded natively in Teradata's new agentic coworker for enterprise data work, Tera, available within Teradata's Autonomous Knowledge Platform in the fall of 2026. The integration brings WisdomAI's deterministic agentic analytics platform to Teradata's enterprise customers, letting business users talk to their data in natural language, build live apps from a single prompt, and deploy proactive AI agents that monitor KPIs, surface root causes, and drive the next action across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data alike. Inside Tera, WisdomAI executes every query directly on Teradata's governed data foundation, with security, lineage, and access controls fully intact, making over 95% accurate agentic BI viable on the regulated, high-performance workloads that have historically been off-limits to AI-driven analytics. The integration also brings WisdomAI together with Tera Context Engine, which gives agents governed business context including industry data models, canonical metrics, business logic, lineage, and policies. The integration will be generally available with the Teradata Autonomous Knowledge Platform on Teradata Cloud in the fourth quarter of 2026, with availability on Teradata Factory to follow.

Kana announced that TIME has deployed two of its agentic marketing applications across the media brand's advertising and sales organizations. TIME's ad operations team is using Kana's Campaign Orchestrator to continuously monitor delivery, pacing and performance across every live campaign, catching under-delivery risk before it becomes a make-good, while its sales organization has rolled out Kana's Media Proposal Generator fleet-wide, automating the translation of inbound RFPs into fully structured, inventory-aware proposals and cutting a process that formerly took days down to minutes. Both applications operate inside guardrails TIME's teams control directly, including budget limits, brand and pricing guidance, and approval thresholds that determine when an agent acts autonomously versus when it escalates to a human for sign-off. Mark Howard, Chief Operating Officer at TIME, said the publisher is proving out what agentic media looks like by augmenting and accelerating its core business processes, and Melanie Ruderman, SVP, Strategy & Sales Enablement at TIME, said the RFP transformation has streamlined operations and collapsed complexity. Kana was founded in 2025 by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, the team behind Krux, Rapt and Habu, and is backed by Mayfield.

Goldman Sachs Group has emerged as the lead bidder to acquire Palmer Square Capital Management, a credit-focused asset manager overseeing $37 billion, according to Bloomberg. The talks mark the latest step in Goldman's effort to bolster its $4 trillion asset management division, though discussions remain ongoing and could still end without a deal. Kansas-based Palmer Square, founded by Chris and Angie Long, is one of the largest issuers of collateralized loan obligations, and its primary attraction is a $27 billion CLO platform within a U.S. market that has quadrupled to more than $1.3 trillion over the past 15 years. The deal would instantly scale Goldman's footprint in structured debt products, an area where it has historically lacked the issuance volume of its largest alternative asset management rivals. The push aligns with recent comments from Chief Executive Officer David Solomon, who said last week that the bank is actively seeking targets to fill specific operational gaps, after acquiring two specialized ETF providers, a commercial real estate investor, and a venture capital firm over the past year. Goldman Sachs stock fell 1.9% in Tuesday trade amid the news.

Pony Express, a Nebraska-based convenience store chain, has launched the Pony Express Rewards app using Liquid Barcode's platform, the tech company announced last week. The app, which is live now, includes Pony Express' points-based loyalty program, a rewards shop where customers can redeem their points, daily games and club cards. Customers at Pony Express' three locations in Iowa and Nebraska can earn 10 points for every $1 spent in store, five points per gallon of fuel purchased and eight points per $1 spent on tobacco products, and can also win points and other prizes via daily games. The program also offers beverage club cards with a buy-10-get-one-free offer on coffees and energy drinks and buy-five-get-one-free on fountain drinks. Nicolette Mayfield, senior manager for retail operations with Pony Express, said the chain found in Liquid Barcodes a partner that could cover all of its loyalty needs with a full-service platform.

Canadian retail tech company Thri5 has secured C$5.4m, or $3.9m, in seed funding following a pilot and subsequent rollout with US-based Wild Fork Foods. The round was co-led by Whitecap Venture Partners and Mistral Venture Partners, with participation from MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, N49P and a group of retail and technology veterans. Thri5 said it will use the funding to grow its engineering, product and commercial teams and to expand its go-to-market activity with enterprise retailers globally. The raise follows a nine-week pilot with Wild Fork Foods in which Thri5 reported a 3% lift in sales, a 3.6% increase in profit and a 2.0 percentage point improvement in inventory accuracy, after which Wild Fork rolled out Thri5 across its store network in the US and Canada. Thri5 describes its product as an AI-native execution layer that sits above a retailer's existing technology stack, and the company estimates the total value at stake from execution leakage can represent 10%-20% of sales. Thri5 was founded in Toronto by Herman Paek and CEO Jeremy Pee, who previously co-founded Loblaw Digital.

Moov Financial, Inc. announced Moov Money, a real-time person-to-person payment solution built in collaboration with Visa and Mastercard that lets consumers send and receive money using only an eligible debit card and a trusted mobile phone connection. Unlike other P2P services that require both parties to use the same app, Moov Money uses the debit card as the payment destination, reaching the 90.5% of U.S. consumers who carry a debit card according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's 2025 Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice. The platform runs on Mastercard Move and Visa Direct, with Moov supplying identity verification, fraud controls and dispute management, and it is available today to banks, credit unions, neobanks and brokerages for domestic person-to-person payments. Jack Henry's Banno Digital Platform is the first to integrate Moov Money, giving more than 1,000 banks and credit unions turnkey access, with others soon to follow. Moov CEO Wade Arnold said moving money shouldn't depend on whether two people use the same app, while Visa Direct North America head Justin Zhao and Mastercard North America EVP Mike Kresse both framed the launch as a step toward interoperable, secure money movement.

HSBC downgraded Netflix to Hold from Buy with a price target of $76, down from $96, citing Alphabet's YouTube taking increasing viewer share from the streaming giant. The call headlines Wall Street's most market-moving research, which also saw Jefferies downgrade both Valero to Hold from Buy with a $401 price target and Marathon Petroleum to Hold from Buy with a $413 price target, while Morgan Stanley cut Ericsson to Underweight from Equal Weight with a price target of $9, down from $11. Among upgrades, Northcoast raised Brinker to Buy from Neutral with a $275 price target, Piper Sandler lifted MetLife to Overweight from Neutral with a price target of $110, up from $99, and Citi upgraded Fifth Third to Buy from Neutral with a price target of $62, up from $59. In initiations, Rosenblatt started SanDisk at Buy with a $2,400 price target, Needham began GE HealthCare at Buy with a $93 price target, and RBC Capital launched Everest Group at Outperform with a $455 price target. William Blair downgraded Endava to Underperform from Market Perform, and Northcoast cut ACV Auctions to Neutral from Buy after the company agreed to be acquired by Copart for $10.50 per share in cash.