Month: 2026-04

EQS via SeaPRwire.com / 13/04/2026 / 09:53 UTC+8 SOFIA, BULGARIA - April 13, 2026 - (SeaPRwire) - nFuse, an AI-powered B2B ordering platform, founded jointly with Appolica, has recently raised an investment from two of Central and Eastern Europe's most active venture funds Eleven Ventures and LAUNCHub to accelerate expansion across Europe, the US, and emerging markets. The investment comes as rising energy costs continue to pressure physical touchpoints across the CPG distribution chain. nFuse replaces traditional B2B ordering apps with everyday messaging channels, enabling retailers to place orders via SMS, WhatsApp, and other messaging platforms without additional apps or logins, while helping sales teams and operators reclaim time for higher-value activities. The company reports retailer adoption rates exceeding 70%, compared to an industry average of approximately 15%. The funding arrives at a critical inflection point for the CPG industry. Energy costs and oil supply disruptions now ripple through up to a third of the CPG value chain - hitting manufacturing, packaging, warehousing, and last-mile distribution simultaneously. At the same time, CPG companies face pressure from the other direction: weakening consumer confidence and declining disposable incomes are compressing top-line growth across key markets. Caught between rising operational costs and slowing revenue, the industry can no longer afford to run its most basic commercial process - reordering - the human effort-led way. The $5 Trillion Channel That Digital Solutions Keep Failing Fragmented trade - the network of independent shops, kiosks, restaurants, and HoReCa operators that dominate commerce across emerging markets - represents over $5 trillion in annual value. In regions such as CESEE, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, these outlets account for the majority of FMCG sales. For CPG companies already navigating margin compression, this channel is both the largest growth opportunity and the most expensive to serve through traditional means. Despite more than a decade of investment in B2B eCommerce platforms, adoption in fragmented trade hovers around 15%. Industry analysts estimate 80–95% of B2B eCommerce projects underperform or fail outright. The platforms work technically. The retailers ignore them. "The fundamental assumption was wrong. The industry built eB2B for headquarters - for the people who wanted dashboards and data. Not for the retailer standing behind a counter who just needs to reorder beer before the weekend rush." -Stoyan Ivanov, Co-Founder and CEO, nFuse The Fix: Meet Retailers Where They Already Are nFuse was founded on a different observation. Across all markets, small retailers are already running their businesses through messaging apps - sending voice notes, photos of empty shelves, and handwritten lists via SMS, WhatsApp, or whatever app they use daily. nFuse turns that existing behavior into a confirmed order in seconds. No new app. No login. No training required. The results are materially different from what traditional platforms deliver: 70%+ retailer adoption with enterprise clients, versus an industry average of 10–15%. Revenue per outlet increases 15–30%. Deployment takes a month, not a year. Cost per order targets below $1 - a 5x to 20x reduction compared to traditional rep-based or call center ordering. For CPG brands under margin pressure, that cost delta is no longer just an efficiency gain. It is a route to profitability on outlets that were previously too expensive to serve. For brands managing distribution at scale, the model also changes the economics of reaching the long tail. Retailers who previously reordered monthly - when a sales rep happened to visit - now reorder weekly. New SKU launches reach outlets faster. And with every transaction flowing through a single channel, real-time demand signals become available across the entire network. "These retailers aren't technology-averse. They're using technology constantly. Just not the technology we kept trying to give them. They don't want another app. They want to order the same way they message their family." - Stefan Radov, Co-Founder and COO, nFuse Investor Perspective "Stoyan and Stefan know the FMCG industry inside out and have set out an ambitious task to solve the broken model of B2B e-commerce solutions. Instead of asking retailers to change their behaviour, the advancements in AI has opened a new frontier of intelligent solutions that speak their language via the channels they usually use. This unlocks enormous opportunities for brands, as the tail of the market can now be served efficiently and at scale." - Ivaylo Simov, Partner, Eleven Ventures "The B2B eCommerce graveyard is full of platforms that worked technically but failed commercially. Most portals force unnatural behavior - buyers do not want to click through SKUs and quantities. nFuse makes ordering natural again via voice, text, or image, just like speaking or texting to a sales rep. With 30 years in distribution, the founders have seen exactly where adoption fails. We backed the insight as much as the product." - Rumen Iliev, Partner, LAUNCHub Ventures What Comes Next The funding will support nFuse's expansion across Europe, with plans extending into broader EMEA and Americas markets. The company currently serves category leaders in beverages, beer, snacks, frozen food, modern nicotine, dairy, pet food, and wholesale distribution, validating the model across FMCG verticals. Beyond ordering, nFuse is building toward payments and predictive demand intelligence - letting retailers pay through the same messaging thread where they place orders, and using aggregated shelf data to generate real-time supply signals for brands. "The industry spent a decade trying to get retailers to come to us. We're just going to where they already are." - Stoyan Ivanov, Co-Founder and CEO, nFuse About nFuse nFuse is an AI-powered B2B ordering platform that enables FMCG retailers and HoReCa operators to place orders and enable two-way conversational commerce through SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, and other messaging apps using text, voice, or images. Founded by ex-Coca-Cola executives Stoyan Ivanov and Stefan Radov - with 30+ years of combined distribution experience - the company partners with leading FMCG production and distribution enterprises across Europe and emerging markets. nFuse is backed by Eleven Ventures and LAUNCHub, and was co-founded with Appolica. Media Contact Company: nFuse Contact: Stoyan Ivanov, Co-Founder and CEO Telephone: +44 7735 302755 Email: stoyan.ivanov@nfuse.ai Website: https://nfuse.ai/ 13/04/2026 Dissemination of a Financial Press Release, transmitted by EQS News.The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.Media archive at www.todayir.com

EQS via SeaPRwire.com / 13/04/2026 / 09:44 UTC+8 As China's daily Token consumption surpasses 140 trillion, OpenAI processes 15 billion Tokens per minute. China's Token usage grows 1,400-fold in just two years—Token, a technical term still unfamiliar two years ago, is becoming the new "kilowatt-hour" of the AI era. On April 12, Shenzhen Xunce Technology Co., Ltd. (3317. HK) signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Shenzhen Data Exchange. At the inflection point where the Token economy is moving from concept to explosion, the signing of this agreement sends a clear signal: China's AI industry is shifting from a "model race" to a "data race", from "general-purpose Tokens" to "vertical Token refining." Xunce Technology is becoming the core "Vertical Token Factory" in this historic process. Token Economics: Why is Token the "Oil" of the AI Era? To understand the significance of this partnership, one must first understand what a Token is. A Token is the basic unit of information processed and generated by AI. You ask AI a question, consuming some Tokens; AI gives you an answer, generating some Tokens. One Token roughly corresponds to one or two Chinese characters. But the significance of Token goes far beyond being a mere "unit of measurement" ——it transforms AI into an economic resource that can be priced, traded, and even futures-traded, just as the "kilowatt-hour" gave electricity a price and the "barrel" gave oil a futures market. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, deconstructed the AI industry into a "five-layer cake": energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. The unified unit of measurement in all five layers is the Token. Huang's definition: Token is the fundamental unit of modern AI, and the language and currency of AI. Tokens are undergoing value stratification. The same Token used for casual chat is worth $0.01 per million; used for coding, it's worth $200; used for legal document review, it's worth $1,000—a difference of a hundred thousand times in value. Less than 5% of Token consumption creates over 80% of measurable value. The value of a Token is not determined by its production cost, but by what it is used for. This is the core logic of vertical Tokens. Token Supply-Demand Imbalance: General Tokens in Surplus, Vertical Tokens Scarce In March 2026, Liu Liehong, Director of the National Data Administration, officially named the Token Ciyuan and disclosed a set of data: China's daily Ciyuan call volume has exceeded 140 trillion, an increase of over 1,400 times compared to 100 billion in early 2024. Nationwide, over 100,000 high-quality datasets have been established, with a total volume exceeding 890 PB—equivalent to about 310 times the total digital resources of the National Library of China. At the same time, global Token demand is undergoing a structural inflection point: shifting from humans using AI to AI using AI by itself. The emergence of Agents has completely changed the rules of the game—it is not a chatbot, but an AI program capable of autonomously executing tasks. If an enterprise deploys 1,000 Agents, each consuming 1 million Tokens per day, that amounts to 365 billion Tokens per year, equivalent to the total consumption of all human users in a medium-sized country. Agents don't just consume Tokens; there are already experimental projects where Agents have their own accounts, autonomously take on tasks, earn income, and then use that income to purchase more Tokens. The next surge in Token demand will no longer come from humans using more, but from machines starting to consume on their own. But a deep contradiction is emerging: general Tokens are experiencing inflation, while vertical Tokens are severely scarce. Large language models can converse fluently, but once they enter vertical scenarios such as financial risk control, medical diagnosis, power dispatch, or robot control, general Tokens fall short. What enterprises truly need are vertical Tokens refined through industry knowledge. The insufficient supply of high-quality vertical data has become the core bottleneck restricting the implementation of vertical large models. Vertical Token Factory: The Core Positioning of Xunce Technology Against this backdrop, Xunce Technology's positioning as a Vertical Token Factory has emerged. If a general-purpose large model is like a power plant, then Xunce Technology is the refinery—it does not produce basic Tokens but rather refines raw data from vertical industries such as finance, telecommunications, electric power, robotics, healthcare, and commercial aerospace into vertical Tokens that large models can directly and efficiently use. With AI Data Agent at its core, Xunce Technology has built a full-chain technical system covering data acquisition, cleansing, standardization, real-time computation, and model fine-tuning. It can transform the complex, heterogeneous private data within enterprises into standardized vertical Tokens that large models can understand, invoke, and measure, all within milliseconds. In 2025, the company's revenue increased by 103% year-on-year to RMB 1.283 billion, the share of non-asset management business revenue rose to 80%, revenue per employee reached RMB 2.9 million, and ARPU jumped from RMB 2.72 million to RMB 5.59 million—behind these figures lies enterprises' genuine willingness to pay for "vertical Tokens". General Tokens are crude oil; vertical Tokens are refined oil. Xunce Technology is that refinery. Strategic Partnership with Shenzhen Data Exchange: Co-building the Standard for Vertical Tokens According to the announcement, this strategic cooperation between Xunce Technology and Shenzhen Data Exchange focuses on three main directions, essentially co-building the production standard for vertical Tokens: First, jointly expand data element and AI innovation businesses to promote enterprise digital and intelligent transformation. As a national-level data exchange, Shenzhen Data Exchange has leading expertise in data compliance circulation and assetization operations. The partnership will accelerate the journey for enterprises from data governance to AI applications. Second, co-build a data assetization and data asset entry service system. As the policy for including data assets on balance sheets is deeply implemented, enterprise data is transforming from cost to asset. Xunce's vertical Token refining capability, combined with Shenzhen Data Exchange's compliance expertise, will provide enterprises with a standardized path to turn data into assets. Third, establish a data specification system for Embodied Intelligence. This is the most forward-looking aspect. The demand for vertical Tokens from Embodied Intelligence (Physical AI) far exceeds that for large language models—robot training requires real physical interaction data; autonomous driving requires massive amounts of real-world driving data. The two parties will jointly develop a vertical Token specification system for scenarios such as intelligent robots, autonomous driving, and smart terminals, addressing the current industry bottleneck of insufficient supply of high-quality vertical Tokens for Physical AI training. The Vertical Token Factory Stands at the Center of the Next Major Opportunity Three distinct business models have emerged in the Token economy: pay-as-you-go (charge for Tokens used), monthly subscription (not charged per Token), and value-based pricing (charge based on the value created). Xunce Technology is advancing its Token-based billing model, which embodies the logic of value-based pricing. Customer Value = Price per Call × Number of Token Calls × Number of Modules Used. The price per call for vertical Tokens is much higher than for general Tokens due to their higher business value content. In 2025, the company's Token-based revenue accounted for 5%, with a target to increase it to 20%-30% in 2026. Conclusion: Xunce Technology's strategic partnership with Shenzhen Data Exchange is a micro-level manifestation of this macro-narrative. Where policy dividends, industrial demand, and technological capability converge, the Vertical Token Factory is no longer a cost center but a value engine. As the Vertical Token Factory, Xunce Technology's long-term value may have just begun to materialize. Because what is truly scarce is not the Token itself, but the ability to turn every Token into refined vertical oil. Enterprise-grade vertical Token factories and vertical models are standing at the center of the next major opportunity. 13/04/2026 Dissemination of a Financial Press Release, transmitted by EQS News.The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.Media archive at www.todayir.com