Radcred has launched a digital-first lending platform to meet the rising demand for online payday loans, offering same-day funding and soft credit checks for borrowers historically overlooked by traditional banks. The new system aims to simplify access to small-dollar financing by matching applicants with licensed lenders through a fully secure online process. Radcred’s lending platform connects borrowers directly to a network of licensed, state-compliant payday lenders. With soft inquiry checks and same-day loan processing, the platform is built for speed and accessibility. Unlike traditional banks, Radcred offers options for those with poor or limited credit histories. The platform supports applications from users across all 50 states, focusing on underserved groups such as part-time workers, gig economy professionals, and those recovering from financial setbacks. Through encrypted processing and smart-matching technology, Radcred ensures quick turnaround times often funding requests within hours. Borrowers can secure a $255 payday loan, a $500 loan no credit check loans or another small-dollar amount based on the offers provided by Payday lenders. The process involves no hard credit pull, helping protect the borrower’s FICO score. All offers are presented upfront, with clear repayment timelines and fee disclosures. The platform works seamlessly on both desktop and mobile devices, ensuring broad accessibility for users in need of instant loans.
Spinwheel provides banks and PFM platforms access to real-time, verified consumer credit data for processing payments as part of their clients’ existing workflow via APIs using credential less technology that requires only phone number and date of birth
Powering the future of the consumer credit ecosystem, Spinwheel is rewiring how consumer credit data is accessed, activated, and embedded into financial workflows. Today, the company announced the close of its $30 million Series A funding round, led by F-Prime with participation from QED Investors, Foundation Capital, and Fika Ventures. Spinwheel’s real-time consumer credit data and payments platform currently supports more than 15 million users and 165 million connected credit and liability accounts, facilitating over $1.5 trillion in consumer debt across its network. The new funding will accelerate development of its agentic AI platform, expand its data sets and product offerings, and scale its go-to-market team as it builds the foundational infrastructure to transform the consumer credit data and payments ecosystem. Today, the consumer credit ecosystem is buckling under the weight of legacy systems. U.S. consumer liabilities have reached $19.5 trillion—up from $13.3 trillion just a decade ago. Additionally, the average American holds between 10 to 14 credit accounts. Despite the scale, the infrastructure supporting credit data access and payments remains fragmented, slow, and riddled with friction for financial institutions, while consumers are left juggling multiple logins and outdated information. “Financial providers are faced with immense customer service friction, high operational and acquisition costs, missing or outdated data sets and a cumbersome, disjointed experience for consumers who, in turn, are struggling to view, understand and manage numerous liability and credit accounts. We are transforming this challenge by building the foundational infrastructure to power the future of the consumer credit ecosystem,” said Tomás Campos, co-founder and CEO, Spinwheel. “We believe this is an enormous opportunity that will outpace open banking. With a focus on first principles and innovation, we will elevate our financial clients’ ability to deliver better credit outcomes to consumers like never before.” Spinwheel was built to establish a unified infrastructure layer that simplifies how liabilities are accessed, activated, and resolved. Spinwheel partners with lenders, marketplaces, personal financial management platforms, and other financial companies to provide real-time, verified consumer credit data to process payments as part of their clients’ existing workflow and operations via APIs. The company’s proprietary, credentialless technology requires only two data fields—phone number and date of birth—streamlining and simplifying user actions and delivering a more complete consumer credit profile, empowering financial clients to provide better financial products and a seamless experience for the consumer. Spinwheel’s clients see significant improvements in conversion rates, increased revenue, lower operational and acquisition costs, as well as mitigated risk. “Spinwheel is tackling one of the most complex and consequential frontiers in financial data: real-time consumer liabilities. While open banking has largely focused on assets, there is a large opportunity in mapping the full liability picture across credit cards, mortgages, student loans, and more,” said David Jegen, Managing Partner at F-Prime. “We’re in the early innings of this category’s evolution. Spinwheel’s team has the right combination of deep technical skill and market insight required to lead in a market where challenges are large and the stakes are high.” This latest funding will accelerate its technology to further automate credit management and unlock more data through its agentic AI platform, expand into new access points and offerings for non-traditional data and sources, and build out its go-to-market team. Spinwheel’s infrastructure is built with bank-grade security standards, ensuring that while data is made more accessible.
Walmart taps Scandit’s smart data capture tech to enhance store associate app with voice-activated personal assistant which enables associates to ask questions to quickly locate merchandise and get answers for customers, as well as look up business metrics
Walmart Inc. is renewing a partnership with AI-based mobile scanning solutions provider Scandit to enhance the functionality of its store associate apps. Since 2022, Walmart has been seamlessly integrating Scandit smart data capture software into several apps it provides store associates in an effort to optimize operational tasks such as order fulfillment, stock replenishment, out-of-stock detection, product information look-up and receipt checks for self-checkout customers. For example, Walmart designed the intuitive user interface of its “MyWalmart” associate app with input from Scandit to provide features including viewing their shifts up to two weeks in advance, checking on their upcoming paid time off, and requesting changes to their schedule. In addition, the app provides all associates access to the Ask Sam voice-activated personal assistant which enables them to ask questions to quickly locate merchandise and get answers for customers, as well as look up business metrics. And instead of scanning each box in the back room individually, associates can hold up their device and using augmented reality, highlight the boxes that are ready to go to the store floor. As part of the new expanded agreement, Scandit will provide Walmart with tools and technologies designed to boost the speed and accuracy of their existing associate and customer-facing applications.
PanTerra Networks platform delivers a single, secure interface to manage AI across contact center, cloud PBX, AI-enhanced video conferencing, team messaging, file sharing, and call handling and adapts to hybrid, remote, and distributed work environments
PanTerra Networks announced the launch of Streams.AI: its next-generation AI-powered platform built to bring customer engagement, automation, intelligence, and control to business communications, all within a unified, admin-friendly environment. Streams.AI empowers organizations to elevate productivity, responsiveness, and customer engagement by embedding AI directly into PanTerra’s flagship Streams platform, enabling both smarter collaboration and more effective customer engagement. The platform delivers a single, secure interface to manage AI across all communication channels—from call routing and IVRs to sentiment-driven escalations and human backup integration. Streams.AI unifies contact center, cloud PBX, AI-enhanced video conferencing, team messaging, file sharing, and call handling into one intelligent platform that adapts to hybrid, remote, and distributed work environments. Central to it all is Streams.AI’s Admin AI portal, a powerful yet intuitive hub that gives IT teams complete control over users, routing, AI behavior, security, and performance. Whether you’re managing 50 users or 5,000 across multiple locations, Streams.AI removes the clutter of disconnected systems and gives businesses a cohesive foundation that can truly scale. At the heart of Streams.AI is Luna AI, PanTerra’s proprietary conversational AI receptionist engine that powers: Context-aware call routing based on sentiment, caller history, or real-time presence; Custom AI personalities that reflect each brand’s tone of voice; Dynamic fallback to human operators with full conversation continuity; Speech-to-intent response matching for faster, more helpful resolutions. For advanced users, PanTerra’s AppDesigner allows full customization of AI-enabled workflows—whether it’s an IVR that taps into billing data or a scheduling assistant that syncs with HR systems.
LinkedIn is taking a multi-agent approach, using a collection of agents collaborating to get the job done; a supervisor agent orchestrates all the tasks among other agents
Going beyond its popular recommender systems and AI-powered search, the company’s AI agent sources and recruits job candidates through a simple natural language interface. LinkedIn is taking a multi-agent approach, using a collection of agents collaborating to get the job done. A supervisor agent orchestrates all the tasks among other agents, including intake and sourcing agents that are “good at one and only one job.” All communication occurs through the supervisor agent, which receives input from human users regarding role qualifications and other details. That agent then provides context to a sourcing agent, which culls through recruiter search stacks and sources candidates along with descriptions on why they might be a good fit for the job. That information is then returned to the supervisor agent, which begins actively interacting with the human user. The agent can then refine qualifications and begin sourcing candidates, working for the hiring manager “both synchronously and asynchronously.” “It knows when to delegate the task to what agent, how to collect feedback and display to the user,” said Deepak Agarwal, chief AI officer at LinkedIn. The goal is to “deeply personalize” experiences with AI that adapts to preferences, learns from behaviors and continues to evolve and improve the more that users interact with it. LinkedIn provides engineers with different algorithms based on RL, supervised fine tuning, pruning, quantization and distillation to use out of the box without worrying about GPU optimization or FLOPS, so they can begin running algorithms and training, said Tejas Dharamsi, LinkedIn senior staff software engineer. In building out its models, LinkedIn focuses on several factors, including reliability, trust, privacy, personalization and price, he said. Models must provide consistent outputs without getting derailed. Users also want to know that they can rely on agents to be consistent; that their work is secure; that past interactions are being used to personalize; and that costs don’t skyrocket.
New act would permanently prohibit additional fees from being imposed on retailers for SNAP EBT transactions
The grocery industry has endorsed the Ensuring Fee-Free Benefit Transactions (EBT) Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation introduced by Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, vice ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, and Rep. Tony Wied, R-Wis., House Agriculture Committee member and onetime small-business owner and retailer. The act would permanently prohibit additional fees from being imposed on retailers for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) electronic benefit transfer (EBT) transactions. “Independent grocers are on the front lines of the fight against food insecurity, investing heavily in technology and training to ensure SNAP works for families who rely on it,” said Stephanie Johnson, group VP for government relations at Washington, D.C.-based NGA. “The EBT Act is a necessary and commonsense solution to protect community-based retailers from new swipe fees that could compromise their ability to provide SNAP benefits and threaten food access in low-income areas.” The EBT Act would make permanent a provision in the 2018 Farm Bill that prohibits states and state contractors from levying processing and other related fees from a state’s side of a SNAP EBT transaction on SNAP-authorized retailers. While a permanent ban on interchange or swipe fees in SNAP already exists, the EBT Act applies the same permanent ban on state-side transaction fees. SNAP-authorized retailers must pay for their side of the costs associated with SNAP EBT transactions, but processing or other related fees outside of retailers’ control have never before been imposed on SNAP-authorized retailers. With the transition to chip cards and mobile payments, grocers are incurring considerable software and hardware costs, and many operators worry that EBT processors may begin charging fees for SNAP transactions, similar to the fees imposed on non-SNAP debit and credit card purchases. Such fees would be a hardship for independent grocers, many of whom operate on razor-thin margins of 1.4%, according to NGA. “Grocers already absorb significant upfront and ongoing costs to participate in SNAP, from purchasing EBT-compliant point-of-sale systems to training staff and ensuring program compliance,” added Johnson. “Adding processing fees would punish retailers for serving vulnerable populations.”
DoorDash launches all-day drone delivery in Dallas-Fort Worth, ordering food from dozens of local and national restaurants
Following a successful pilot, DoorDash and Flytrex have launched drone delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Customers in parts of Little Elm and Frisco, Texas, can now order food from dozens of local and national restaurants, between 8:00 a.m. and 9:30 p.m., with delivery by Flytrex’s autonomous drone fleet. The launch marks Flytrex’s first third-party app integration, allowing customers to place orders directly through the DoorDash app. Eligible customers can choose drone delivery when checking out, with orders prepared at restaurants and flown to their homes. The service currently reaches more than 30,000 households and 100,000-plus residents, with additional sites in the area launching in the near future. According to DoorDash, it now offers the region’s most expansive drone operating hours and the highest payload capacity. Flytrex drones can carry as much as 6.6 pounds — the largest amount in the area — and next-generation models will boost capacity to 8.8 pounds. To accommodate the deliveries, neighborhoods have established drop-off points at public and communal locations throughout the coverage area. Flytrex has additionally implemented advanced drone traffic control technology, enabling various drone operators to serve overlapping communities while safely managing flight paths via automated systems, a move that broadens suburban coverage.
Walmart’s AI architecture rejects horizontal platforms for targeted stakeholder solutions, each group receives purpose-built tools that address specific operational frictions
Walmart continues to make strides in cracking the code on deploying agentic AI at enterprise scale. One of the retailer’s primary objectives is to consistently maintain and strengthen customer confidence among its 255 million weekly shoppers. Walmart’s AI architecture rejects horizontal platforms for targeted stakeholder solutions. Each group receives purpose-built tools that address specific operational frictions. Customers engage Sparky for natural language shopping. Field associates get inventory and workflow optimization tools. Merchants access decision-support systems for category management. Sellers receive business integration capabilities. The segmentation acknowledges the fundamental need of each team in Walmart to have purpose-built tools for their specific jobs. Store associates managing inventory need different tools from merchants analyzing regional trends. Generic platforms fail because they ignore operational reality. Walmart’s specificity drives adoption through relevance, not mandate. Walmart’s Trend to Product system quantifies the operational value of AI. The platform synthesizes social media signals, customer behavior and regional patterns to slash product development from months to weeks. The system creates products in response to real-time demand rather than historical data. The months-to-weeks compression transforms Walmart’s retail economics. Inventory turns accelerate. Markdown exposure shrinks. Capital efficiency multiplies. The company maintains price leadership while matching any competitor’s speed-to-market capabilities. Every high-velocity category can benefit from using AI to shrink time-to-market and deliver quantifiable gains. Walmart’s approach to agent orchestration draws directly from its hard-won experience with distributed systems. The company uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) to standardize how agents interact with existing services. Walmart leverages decades of employee knowledge, making it a core component of its growing AI capabilities. The company systematically captures category expertise from thousands of merchants, creating a competitive advantage no digital-first retailer can match. The strategic advantage compounds. Walmart’s 2.2 million associates represent proprietary intelligence that algorithms cannot synthesize independently. Their framework applies across industries. Financial services organizations balancing customer needs with regulatory requirements, healthcare systems coordinating patient care across providers, manufacturers managing complex supply chains are all facing similar multi-stakeholder challenges. Walmart’s approach provides a tested methodology for addressing this complexity.
Sam’s Club AI-enables omnichannel ad measurement for brand partners using deterministic data from the Sam’s Club closed-loop ecosystem
Sam’s Club is releasing a solution called Omni-Impact, an AI-based tool for Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) retail media network to track ad performance. Omni‑Impact uses deterministic data from the Sam’s Club closed-loop ecosystem to let advertisers see what is driving incremental sales across all MAP on-site and off-site channels and over time. It also offers a 12-month longitudinal view of campaign performance across MAP channels. To help ensure consistency, Omni‑Impact applies a single, unified methodology across all MAP ad solutions. As a result, participating brands can use standardized metrics to compare performance across tactics. Omni‑Impact also simulates media mix strategies and delivers predictive budget guidance tailored to each advertiser’s historical performance and category dynamics. Omni‑Impact surfaces performance trends across a wide range of audience segments, such as age, household size or membership tiers. The retailer also recently began using first-party data to create personalized experiences through an offering called MAP’s Omni Experiences. This offering combines digital performance tactics like search and display with immersive experiences in and around media activations via channel, including online and in-store. These experiences can promote large-scale seasonal events, such as back-to-school, as well as smaller brand-led localized events.
Afresh grocery tech reduces shrink by 25% and lifts sales by an average of 3% digging down to the granular level on products that are trickier to track
AI-powered software company Afresh made to the THRIVE Top 50 FoodTech Companies list for the second year in a row. “The platform leverages artificial intelligence to ingest and digitize large volumes of fresh data, enabling accurate item-level forecasts, inventory understanding, and perishability predictions,” THRIVE said. “This empowers grocers to make margin-boosting decisions across their supply chain, reducing food waste and increasing product freshness.” Afresh positions itself as a mission-driven operation “driving both environmental and business results for grocery retailers” through its proprietary software that eliminates food waste through technological efficiency. While initially focused on reducing waste in the produce section, Afresh expanded its reach in 2023 to include the meat, seafood, deli, and foodservice departments. The company said its technology reduces shrink by a whopping 25% and lifts sales by an average of 3%. Afresh has developed a system that digs down to the granular level on products that are trickier to track, such as foods from the salad and hot bars. Rather than forecasting out a few days in advance, Afresh’s tech can estimate demand more than a month in advance. That longer time horizon helps grocers more efficiently plan orders. Once Afresh’s store ordering system is combined with its distribution ordering system “you can create this true demand signal across the chain and truly optimize your decisions.”