By Market & Region

Delray Beach, Fla. – September 28, 2026 -- The global telehealth and telemedicine market is projected to grow from USD 118.8 billion in 2026 to USD 198.9 billion by 2031, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 10.9%, according to a new report from MarketsandMarkets. A separate figure cited in the same report puts the 2025 market at USD 106.0 billion, underscoring the sector's rapid acceleration ahead of the forecast period.

New York – September 28, 2026 -- American investors identified NATO's Eastern Flank as one of the decade's major infrastructure investment opportunities, on condition that projects carry clearly allocated risk and rely on local partners capable of long-term construction and maintenance. The assessment emerged from a roundtable held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, hosted by Romanian infrastructure firm Concelex and Atlantic Council Romania, and addressed by Romania's President Nicușor Dan.

Ukraine's rapid infrastructure repairs reshape crisis-readiness standards

Participants examined how the war in Ukraine has redefined infrastructure requirements near NATO's eastern border. Restoring a railway bridge, transformer substation or hospital hinges on heavy equipment, compatible structural components and certified response teams already positioned on-site, since these capabilities cannot be mobilized within days once a crisis begins.

New Orleans – September 28, 2026 -- Novogradac will convene community development entities, investors, developers and advisors at The Roosevelt New Orleans on Oct. 22-23 for its 2026 Fall New Markets Tax Credit Conference, focused on how NMTC financing is being deployed for housing-related development amid tightening market conditions.

Conference agenda targets compliance and allocation strategy

Sessions will cover the state of the NMTC program, an investor panel on market perspectives, an NMTC compliance overview, and how CDEs, investors and sponsors are positioning for current and future allocation cycles. Organizers say increased regulatory scrutiny is reshaping compliance expectations for program participants.

Kawanishi – September 28, 2026 -- Green Science Alliance has more than doubled the performance of its aqueous rechargeable aluminum-ion battery (AAIB) by swapping the cathode current collector for a commercially cheap conductive carbon rubber sheet, according to research led by Dr. Ryohei Mori.

Capacity climbs to 210 mAhg-1 from an earlier 103 mAhg-1 baseline

Under 0.025 C at room temperature, the redesigned AAIB delivered an initial capacity of at least 210 mAhg-1, sustained through at least 25 cycles in ongoing testing. The prior generation of the technology, detailed in Mori's 2025 review article in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Energy Advances (DOI: 10.1039/D5YA00148J), had capacity of roughly 103 mAhg-1 with poor cycle stability.

De Graff, Ohio – September 28, 2026 -- PCPI Plastics, LLC is celebrating 50 years of custom thermoplastic injection molding, having been founded in 1976, while confirming fresh investment in new presses, molds and automation to boost output for customers.

PCPI expands automation and press capacity to serve six industry verticals

The Ohio-based manufacturer serves customers across aerospace and defense, medical devices and pharmaceutical, automotive, electronics, industrial and consumer markets. Company leadership says the recent capital investment in new presses, molds and automation is aimed at improving both quality and cost competitiveness for its client base.

Hubei – September 28, 2026 -- Hubei Nature New Material Sanitary Appliance Co., Ltd. (NAITRON) has integrated PLC-based digital controls with its patented thermosetting molding technology (TMT) to manufacture granite composite kitchen sinks, targeting more consistent quality and higher-volume output for OEM and ODM clients worldwide.

Digital controls cut reliance on manual production steps

The company's molding system uses automated material dosing and an independent intelligent temperature management system, reducing labor costs and human error across the production line. NAITRON's TMT technology distributes particles evenly across both sink surfaces and molds each unit through a single compression process, eliminating joints or spliced sections that could cause deformation or cracking.

New York – September 28, 2026 -- Eighty-four percent of global wealth management firms say their operating models need a fundamental redesign to capture AI's full value, yet fewer than 10% report being prepared for that shift, according to a new HCLTech study.

The report, titled "Hidden In Pl(AI)n Sight," is based on a synthetic research methodology surveying 1,066 AI personas modeled on senior wealth management decision-makers across 17 global markets. It was produced in partnership with research firm Evidenza.

Adoption outpaces agentic AI deployment by a wide margin

While 98% of leadership teams in the sector are actively pursuing an AI agenda, only slightly more than 7% are building agentic AI capabilities, the study found. HCLTech attributes the gap to firms funding AI primarily for efficiency gains rather than structural transformation.

St. Louis – September 28, 2026 -- Balto Software has launched Kodi, an AI coworker for contact center leaders that moves beyond generating insights to directly executing approved changes across the tools teams use to run daily operations.

Kodi investigates problems and implements fixes without manual handoffs

Kodi can investigate underlying customer interactions, identify factors driving a given outcome, and present evidence before recommending a course of action. Once a leader reviews and approves the recommendation, Kodi executes it directly within Balto's platform through Agent Assist, coaching modules, QA scorecards, compliance scorecards, Notes, dynamic prompts, checklists, dashboards, and data fields.

Kyle Jones, VP of Product at Balto, said most insights tools stop at identifying a problem, while Kodi is designed to carry the process through to execution inside the platform.

San Francisco – – September 28, 2026 -- Fulcrum has launched a certificate workflow that turns an emailed request into a complete, endorsement-ready certificate in under a minute, built on the same policy data the platform already uses for policy checking and proposal generation.

Fulcrum reads the policy instead of filling a template

The workflow parses the inbound request and any attached contract, compares the demanded coverage against what the client's policy actually provides, and flags requests the policy cannot satisfy before an account manager commits to anything. It locates the relevant endorsement forms inside the policy itself, pulls them, sorts them by the situation they apply to, and attaches them, using description-of-operations language the agency has already approved and shaped to each client's preferences. Account managers review and approve every certificate before it issues.

Denver – September 28, 2026 -- Vertafore has launched its Velocity Document Intelligence Agent, an AI tool that cut document research time by up to 90% in early testing, reducing tasks that took 20 minutes to just two minutes.

AI agent automates research across insurance documents

Available within Vertafore's ImageRight platform, the Document Intelligence Agent lets agency, MGA, and carrier teams ask questions in natural language to search across Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, and emails. The tool synthesizes answers with document- and page-level source citations, using contextual meaning rather than keyword matching to surface relevant information.

West Palm Beach – September 28, 2026 -- Sterling Organization has acquired a three-property, grocery-anchored shopping center portfolio totaling 277,057 square feet on behalf of its Sterling United Properties (SUP) fund series. The portfolio is 99% leased collectively and spans two California assets and one Hawaii property, each anchored by a Safeway supermarket.

Portfolio combines Bay Area and Honolulu assets across 277,057 square feet

The acquisition includes Safeway Burlingame, a 70,174-square-foot center that is 100% leased, and Pleasanton Gateway Shopping Center, a 128,275-square-foot property that is 99% leased, both in the San Francisco Bay Area. The third asset, Kapahulu Shopping Center in Honolulu, totals 78,608 square feet and is 97% leased, marking Sterling's first investment in Hawaii.

Rosemont, Ill. – September 28, 2026 -- More than 75 million people in the United States live in a county without a vascular surgeon, according to new county-level data released by the American College of Surgeons (ACS), exposing a care gap as the population most vulnerable to vascular disease grows sharply toward 2030, when all baby boomers will be at least 65.

New mapping tool counts just 4,685 vascular surgeons across 3,144 U.S. counties

The ACS Surgical Workforce Mapping Tool, built with the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS), found an average of 1.4 vascular surgeons per 100,000 people nationwide. While 290 hospital referral regions contain at least one vascular surgeon, 2,320 counties within those same regions have none, showing that regional averages mask local access failures.

Stamford, Conn. – September 28, 2026 -- Charter Communications' Spectrum brand has activated compute capacity across more than 1,000 owned and operated edge data centers, placing processing power within 10 milliseconds of 500 million connected devices in U.S. homes and businesses.

The buildout, branded Edge Compute Infrastructure (ECI) and powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms, combines Spectrum's fiber network with distributed facilities to move AI processing closer to where data is generated -- a requirement as AI shifts from answering text prompts to controlling physical machines such as robots and sensors.

Grapevine, Texas – September 28, 2026 -- Kubota Tractor Corporation has named ten community nonprofits as winners of its 2026 Hometown Proud grant program, each receiving $25,000 in cash and $25,000 toward Kubota equipment purchases, totaling $500,000 in combined funding and machinery across the country.

Program draws more than 1,100 applications in its sixth year

Kubota's review process selected 10 winners from over 1,100 submissions, covering agricultural education, workforce development, food security, youth empowerment and environmental stewardship projects. Since the program launched, Kubota has distributed more than $2.9 million in total funding and equipment to hometown initiatives nationwide.

Boston – September 28, 2026 -- John Hancock has expanded its protection insurance portfolio, enhancing its Protection Indexed Universal Life solution (Protection IUL 26) and its term life insurance suite to give financial professionals more tools for addressing clients' long-term planning needs.

Longevity Preparedness Index shows US adults score just 60 out of 100

John Hancock's 2025 Longevity Preparedness Index, developed with the MIT AgeLab, found that U.S. adults averaged only 60 out of 100 in overall preparedness for longer lives. The study, based on a representative sample of 1,307 Americans surveyed between May 14 and June 5, 2025, found planning needs extend across health, care, housing, community, and major life transitions—beyond a single financial goal.

Dallas – September 28, 2026 -- Conifers has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone AI SOC Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc # US54127026, September 2026), the company announced.

Conifers' CognitiveSOC platform unifies fragmented security operations into one adaptive system

The recognition arrives as security operations centers confront autonomous agents built on frontier models capable of discovering vulnerabilities and moving across systems at machine speed. Conifers built its CognitiveSOCTM platform to connect threat intelligence, threat hunting, detection engineering, investigation, and remediation into a single continuously adapting operating layer, replacing disconnected tools and manual handoffs. Every CognitiveSOC decision includes a reasoning trace analysts can inspect, with machine-speed actions constrained by permissions, policies, and approval thresholds set by security teams.

New Orleans – September 28, 2026 -- LabWare has launched LabWare WATER, a cloud-based SaaS platform designed to help smaller municipal water utilities manage sampling, laboratory testing, documentation, and regulatory reporting from a single system.

LabWare unveils WATER platform to cut compliance paperwork for utilities

The solution targets utilities that test in-house, outsource to contract laboratories, or run hybrid operations, replacing spreadsheets and paper records with a unified SaaS system. LabWare WATER covers the full compliance lifecycle, from scheduling monthly, quarterly, annual, and event-driven sampling to tracking chain-of-custody documentation and flagging exceedances, missing results, and overdue reporting deadlines.

Toronto – September 28, 2026 -- Daedal Systems has raised US$4.035 million to build and deploy its first standardized plasma diagnostic systems with pilot customers in the fusion industry. OMERS Ventures led the round, joined by Garage Capital, Panache Ventures, Ripple Ventures, MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund and a group of angel investors.

Funding will build three diagnostic systems for pilot deployment

Daedal will use the capital to construct its first three diagnostic systems and deploy prototypes under contract with pilot customers. The company has also established a research partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Riyadh – September 28, 2026 -- Saudi Power Procurement Company (SPPC) has awarded China's Gotion High-Tech 6 GWh of battery storage capacity in the kingdom's first utility-scale energy storage program, giving the supplier roughly 75% of the total tender.

Gotion secures all three core sites in $1.16 billion G1 project

The G1 project totals 2 GW/8 GWh and carries an estimated value of $1.16 billion. Gotion secured all three anchor sites—Al Muwayah, Haden and Al Kahafa—each rated at 500 MW/2 GWh, making it the single largest technology supplier in the program. The award marks the first international large-scale deployment of Gotion Grid, the company's utility-scale storage system.

Melbourne – September 28, 2026 -- Heidi, the AI Care Partner used across global health systems, unveiled Heidi II, a platform upgrade that executes the administrative work surrounding patient visits rather than merely documenting them, the company announced.

Heidi supports 2.8 million weekly patient visits and surfaces 10 million follow-up tasks

Until now those tasks were handed back to clinicians to complete manually. The average doctor spends 8.7 hours a week, or 16.6% of working hours, on administration spread across four to six separate systems per visit, according to Heidi.

Heidi's Scribe has recorded 175 million visits and 67 million clinical hours to date

Heidi Evidence has answered more than 10 million clinical queries since launch, and the platform has surfaced over 400 million follow-on tasks since February 2024.