Africa Articles
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Andersen Global Strengthens Presence in India with JMP Advisors
NIQ Introduces NIQ Cadence: A Compound AI Operating System for Marketing Effectiveness
Fortegra Strengthens Actuarial Leadership with Appointment of Anthony Katz as SVP, Reserving
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Clearlake Capital Closes on $14.8 Billion to Capitalize on AI-Driven Transformation and Continue Sector-Focused Investment Strategy
SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Tuesday, 16. June 2026 AETOSWire
Fund VIII Reflects Strong Global Investor Support for Clearlake’s Integrated Platform, Operational Value-Creation Model, and AI-Enabled Investment Approach
(BUSINESS WIRE) -- Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. (“Clearlake” or the “Firm”), a global investment firm managing integrated platforms spanning private equity, liquid and private credit, and other related strategies, today announced the successful close of its eighth flagship fund, Clearlake Capital Partners VIII (“Fund VIII”), alongside related co-investment vehicles and separately managed accounts. Together, these vehicles represent $14.8 billion of capital commitments and position Clearlake to continue investing behind the secular trends reshaping industries, including artificial intelligence, software modernization, digital transformation, and operational efficiency.
The successful fundraise comes amid a highly competitive and selective fundraising environment for private markets and underscores continued investor confidence in Clearlake's differentiated sector-focused strategy, integrated investment platform, and proven ability to create value across market cycles. The close was supported by a diverse group of nearly 300 existing and new investors globally, representing six continents and 35 countries, reflecting continued confidence in the Firm’s disciplined investment approach and long-term performance.
“We are grateful for the strong support from both existing and new limited partners around the world,” said José E. Feliciano, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Clearlake Capital. “In an environment where investors are increasingly concentrating capital with scaled, differentiated managers, Fund VIII reflects the strength of our platform, the consistency of our performance, and the enduring partnerships we have built with our investors over the past two decades. We believe our integrated approach, combining deep sector expertise, operational capabilities, and technology enabled value creation, positions us well to capitalize on compelling opportunities for our investors.”
“Periods of disruption often create the most attractive opportunities for value creation,” said Behdad Eghbali, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Clearlake Capital. “We believe our combination of sector specialization, operational expertise, differentiated use of AI, and flexible capital solutions positions us to help businesses accelerate transformation and achieve their next stage of growth. With Fund VIII, we are well-positioned to partner with management teams navigating this evolution and continue delivering long-term value for our investors.”
Fund VIII has already begun deploying capital across investments aligned with Clearlake’s sector-focused strategy and conviction around AI-driven transformation. Through Clearlake AI Labs and external AI partners, Clearlake works alongside management teams to identify and implement high-impact initiatives across operations, product development, customer engagement, and decision-making. Recent investments, including Dun & Bradstreet, Qualus, and ModMed, reflect Clearlake’s focus on partnering with businesses positioned to benefit from technology-enabled transformation and long-term secular growth.
The close follows a period of significant portfolio activity and realized value creation, including approximately $22 billion of realizations over the last five years across investments such as Concert Golf Partners, Brightly, Janus International Group, and Team Technologies, demonstrating Clearlake’s ability to execute its strategy and generate liquidity for investors across varying market environments.
Evercore Private Funds Group acted as the primary fundraising advisor and global placement agent for Fund VIII, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal adviser for the Fund.
About Clearlake
Clearlake Capital is a leading global alternative asset manager founded in 2006 with over $185 billion of assets under management. Clearlake offers a broad range of investment solutions across private equity, credit, infrastructure, secondaries, co-investments, and other related private market strategies. Through Pathway Capital Management, a division of Clearlake, the Firm serves institutional and wealth investors seeking diversified access to private markets. Clearlake seeks to partner with experienced management teams by providing patient, long-term capital to businesses across multiple sectors. The Firm aims to drive value through its active, hands-on operating approach, O.P.S.® (Operations, People, Strategy), which combines deep operational expertise with strategic and talent-focused initiatives. Headquartered in Santa Monica, Clearlake maintains 14 offices across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. For more information, please visit clearlake.com or follow us on LinkedIn.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260616532544/en/
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https://www.aetoswire.com/en/news/1606202655726
Contacts
Investor Contact:
Patrick Gilligan
310-400-8844
pgilligan@clearlake.com
Media Contact:
Tasha Pelio
310-400-8879
Tasha.pelio@clearlake.com
The Smarter E Europe Sends a Strong Message: the Energy Future Is Renewable
Moody’s Launches Decision-Grade AI Skills for Major AI Platforms
NEW YORK - Wednesday, 17. June 2026 AETOSWire
Launching today on Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork, with availability expanding across compatible AI platforms
(BUSINESS WIRE)--Moody’s Corporation (NYSE: MCO) today announced the release of its first set of AI skills – purpose-built, platform-agnostic instruction kits that encode Moody’s analytical frameworks and connect AI agents to its decision-grade intelligence. Available across compatible AI platforms beginning with Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork, Moody’s skills enable customers to execute complex analytical workflows through a single natural-language request, with outputs grounded in Moody’s proprietary ratings, research, and risk intelligence.
“Moody’s is among the first financial data providers to deliver a full library of skills on an open standard, and today’s launch is just the beginning,” said Cristina Pieretti, Head of Digital Content and Innovation at Moody’s. “AI platforms are becoming the interface for financial decision-making, and the next phase of adoption will be defined by execution. Skills are how we encode Moody’s expertise into that execution layer.”
Skills are emerging as the standard for how AI agents execute specialist work. By publishing its analytical frameworks as skills that run on the platforms where market participants already build and operate, Moody’s is embedding its decision-grade intelligence at the center of how financial analysis is executed across the industry.
Moody’s first wave of skills covers high-priority financial workflows where Moody’s expertise is most concentrated:
Earnings Call Summary – Summarizes earnings call transcripts, covering revenue trends, pricing dynamics, consumer health, tariff exposure, and more.
Peer Analysis – Produces an investor-grade comparison across leverage, profitability, ESG, credit quality, and more.
Public Information Book – Builds a comprehensive dossier on a single entity, spanning financials, governance, competitive landscape, and risk profile.
Rating Pitch – Generates a structured pitch deck covering sector context, rating history, and peer positioning.
Sector Analysis – Combines Moody’s proprietary research with live market intelligence to deliver a full sector-level outlook.
Each skill encodes analytical steps and quality standards to produce outputs that are consistent, sourced, and defensible for high-stakes decision-making in regulated environments. A skill defines how the work is done; Moody's Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers connect it to the data it runs on. MCP is the open standard that lets an AI agent draw directly on Moody's ratings, research, and risk intelligence, so the outputs are grounded in proprietary data rather than general-purpose web content.
A skill teaches an AI agent how to perform a task to a defined standard, captured in a simple, shareable instruction file. Moody's skills are built on the open SKILL.md format, which originated with Anthropic and has since been adopted by platforms like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Because the standard is open, the institutional knowledge encoded in each skill is a durable, portable asset rather than a capability locked to one provider, built once and able to run on any compatible platform.
Moody's plans to expand its library of skills to include credit analysis, lead generation, third-party due diligence, and insurance underwriting – extending its analytical frameworks into more of the high-stakes workflows where financial professionals operate. Each new skill will follow the same open, platform-agnostic standard, ensuring the institutional knowledge remains a durable, portable asset across compatible AI platforms.
To learn more, visit https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/creditview/blog/moodys-skills.html
About Moody’s Corporation
In a world shaped by increasingly interconnected risks, Moody's (NYSE: MCO) data, insights, and innovative technologies help customers develop a holistic view of their world and unlock opportunities. With a rich history of experience in global markets and a diverse workforce of approximately 16,000 across more than 40 countries, Moody's gives customers the comprehensive perspective needed to act with confidence and thrive. Learn more at moodys.com.
“Safe Harbor” statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995
Certain statements contained in this document are forward-looking statements and are based on future expectations, plans and prospects for Moody’s business and operations that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Such statements involve estimates, projections, goals, forecasts, assumptions and uncertainties that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those contemplated, expressed, projected, anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. Stockholders and investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements and other information in this document are made as of the date hereof, and Moody’s undertakes no obligation (nor does it intend) to publicly supplement, update or revise such statements on a going-forward basis, whether as a result of subsequent developments, changed expectations or otherwise, except as required by applicable law or regulation. Factors, risks and uncertainties as well as other risks and uncertainties that could cause Moody’s actual results to differ materially from those contemplated, expressed, projected, anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements are described in greater detail under “Risk Factors” in Part I, Item 1A of Moody’s annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and in other filings made by the Company from time to time with the SEC or in materials incorporated herein or therein. Stockholders and investors are cautioned that the occurrence of any of these factors, risks and uncertainties may cause the Company’s actual results to differ materially from those contemplated, expressed, projected, anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements, which could have a material and adverse effect on the Company’s business, results of operations and financial condition.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260617564049/en/
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https://www.aetoswire.com/en/news/1706202655759
Contacts
For Moody’s Communications:
Chris Cashman
Moody’s Corporation
+1 212-553-1461
chris.cashman@moodys.com
Respond.io Raises $62.5M Series B to Scale AI-Powered Customer Conversations Into North America and Europe
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Tuesday, 16. June 2026 AETOSWire Print
62.5M Series B led by Camber Partners, with existing investors participating.
Respond.io is profitable with $35M ARR, 169% year-over-year growth, and a 30% profit margin.
New capital will fund expansion into and mergers and acquisitions within North America and Europe.
(BUSINESS WIRE)--Respond.io, a customer conversation management platform, today announced a $62.5 million Series B round led by Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors.
What respond.io does
Respond.io enables mid-market B2C businesses to grow revenue from high volumes of customer chats and calls. It unifies WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LINE, Telegram, WeChat, voice calls, email, web chat and 16 more integrations into a single platform with AI agents, automation, and CRMs. This turns fragmented customer conversations into a measurable revenue engine, purpose-built for real-world scale and complexity.
The company serves industries where customers initiate conversations before buying, booking, or committing, including education, healthcare, automotive, retail and travel. The platform powers 2 billion messages per quarter for more than 10,000 businesses in over 180 countries, including Toyota, British Airways, Radisson, Hertz, and Decathlon.
Respond.io generates $35M in annual recurring revenue, growing 169% year-over-year, at a 30% profit margin. It is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, and an official Meta Business and TikTok Marketing Partner.
Why Camber Partners
The funding was led by Camber Partners, a New York City-based growth equity firm that invests in only a handful of capital-efficient software businesses per year, with a pre-fund portfolio that includes Dropbox, PandaDoc, and Pipedrive. Camber brings deep operational engagement to their partnerships, including support in go-to-market, data science, and talent. As a US-based firm with European market experience, the relationship maps directly to respond.io's geographic expansion plans.
"When we started talking to Camber Partners, that conversation felt different," said Gerardo Salandra, CEO and co-founder of respond.io. "We built respond.io over nine years across markets most competitors never entered and did it profitably. Camber Partners and other investors backed us because they understand what that means: real product-market fit, with great unit economics, and a business that raises to accelerate, not to survive."
"Respond.io spent nine years building the infrastructure for high consideration, AI-native customer conversations - and they did it profitably in diverse markets. They have an exceptional team that has leveraged AI to accelerate rapidly. We believe respond.io is positioned to lead this category at a global scale," said Scott Irwin, founder and partner, Camber Partners.
From omnichannel inbox to native AI infrastructure
Respond.io launched in 2017 to solve a straightforward problem: customers were moving to messaging apps, but businesses struggled to respond from separate channel inboxes. The founding team built a platform that consolidated fragmented conversations into a single platform with automation and routing.
As frontier LLMs matured, the team realized this foundation was exactly what autonomous agents needed to operate on to enable rapid revenue acceleration for the high-consideration businesses they serve. Respond.io had spent years assembling the infrastructure — every major messaging channel, voice, email, CRM integrations, compliance controls — and accumulating the kind of operational depth that comes only from years of running high-volume conversations. This enabled it to roll out native AI technologies that meaningfully address real business needs.
This advantage is structural and compounds over time. Processing more conversations than any comparable platform creates a data flywheel — aggregate intelligence about how businesses actually deploy AI in high-volume messaging, the patterns that work, the edge cases that don't — that continuously shapes how respond.io's AI features are built and improved. Newer or lighter platforms building on the same frontier models cannot buy these operational signals or guarantee the same 99.999% uptime at the volumes AI brings. Today, Respond.io’s AI Agents engage thousands of leads daily, qualify them and close B2C sales autonomously, handing off to human operators with full context for edge cases.
The speed of respond.io’s innovation attracted some of the largest partners in the ecosystem. Meta and TikTok chose respond.io for early rollouts of WhatsApp Business Calling API, TikTok Business Messaging, and TikTok Messaging Ads — making it one of the few platforms offering end-to-end integrations for both messaging and calling.
"Most businesses still treat customer conversations as a cost to manage. The ones winning right now treat them as the revenue channel they actually are, and they're automating everything that doesn't require a human so the humans can focus where they add the most value,” Salandra said. “We see it in our customers every day — we have case studies showing AI Agents are handling 600% more leads with conversation rates as high as 84%.”
Entering North America and Europe
Respond.io built category leadership across APAC, LATAM and EMEA — markets where mobile messaging is the primary commercial channel — and reached profitability doing so. The capital from this new round will accelerate the company’s expansion in North America and Europe, where social commerce on TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp is growing, and mid-market B2C businesses are increasingly running the same types of revenue-critical conversations that respond.io has powered for years.
"The customer conversation management space is at an inflection point," Salandra said. "North America and Western Europe are moving toward leveraging conversations as a competitive advantage to generate revenue, using similar workflows we've already built and tested in markets where this shift happened first. We know how to serve these businesses, and with this funding, we now have the resources to reach them faster."
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Chairman of Endeavor Catalyst commented: "We are thrilled to be investing in respond.io in this new round. Respond.io is exactly the kind of company we are proud to support — founders building profitable infrastructure in emerging markets and scaling them into the world's largest economies. So proud to have them in the Endeavor Catalyst family!"
About respond.io
Respond.io is a customer conversation management platform that unifies messaging, calls, email, and CRM to help mid-market B2C businesses drive revenue from customer conversations. The platform powers 2 billion messages per quarter for 10,000+ businesses in over 180 countries and territories with 99.999% platform uptime. Respond.io is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, and an official Meta Business and TikTok Marketing partner. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, it raised US$7 million in Series A funding in 2022. For more information, visit https://respond.io.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260616926452/en/
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https://www.aetoswire.com/en/news/1606202655706
Contacts
respond.io
pr@respond.io