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DFI Retail Group and The Mills Fabrica Name Number 8 Bio as the Winner of DFI Sustainability Innovation Challenge

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The competition drew over 40 global submissions to decarbonise beef and dairy supply chains, with winning solution set to scale across one of Asia’s leading retail networks

HONG KONG SAR- Media OutReach Newswire – 9 June 2026 – DFI Retail Group (DFI or the Group), a leading Asian retailer, and The Mills Fabrica, a global collaborative hub propelling sustainability-focused innovations in the techstyle and agrifood sectors, named Number 8 Bio as the winner of the DFI Sustainability Innovation Challenge 2026. This announcement follows the Final Pitching event, which was held on 5 June, World Environment Day. The Australia-based innovator was recognised for BetterFeed™, a range of proprietary feed additives that cut enteric methane from grazing cattle and sheep while improving the productivity of every animal that uses it. The team takes home a HK$120,000 grant and the opportunity to partner with DFI to scale its solution across the Group’s regional beef and dairy supply chains.

Representatives of DFI Retail Group, The Mills Fabrica, and the judging panel jointly presented the award to Thomas Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of Number 8 Bio, who was named the winner of the Challenge.

Scott Price, Group Chief Executive, DFI Retail Group said: “Tackling Scope 3 emissions requires collaboration across the value chain, and we are pleased that the Challenge has created opportunities for innovators to test and scale practical solutions within real operating environments. We look forward to seeing how they support our progress towards more sustainable and resilient food systems.”

Meet the Winner: From Pitch to Pilot Across Asia’s Supply Chains

Number 8 Bio has built a feed additive that does two jobs at once. BetterFeed™, a family of proprietary organic small molecules, free of bromoform, reduces enteric methane from grazing cattle and sheep, which is responsible for both the majority of livestock emissions and a 12% loss of nutritional energy from every pasture. By stopping that methane from forming, BetterFeed™ redirects the recovered energy straight back into animal growth and production, a genuine win for farmers’ bottom lines as much as for the climate. Winning the DFI Sustainability Innovation Challenge opens a pilot pathway across DFI’s beef and dairy supply chains, including with Mengniu Dairy and Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Company Limited (CPF).

Thomas Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of Number 8 Bio said, “We are grateful for the exposure to such a high-calibre ecosystem, from fellow innovators addressing the same problem from different angles to the investors and industry players. The conversations alone have accelerated our thinking in ways that months of independent work could not.”

A Global Search Anchored in Asia: Addressing the Region’s Beef and Dairy Decarbonisation Challenge

Across Asia, rising incomes and urbanisation continue to drive demand for meat and dairy products. Supporting the transition to lower-emission production will be key to ensuring the long-term resilience of food systems while meeting evolving consumer expectations.

Launched in December 2025, the DFI Sustainability Innovation Challenge was designed to bridge innovation and implementation by connecting global innovators directly with DFI’s extensive supply-chain network.

Through The Mills Fabrica’s global scouting network across 30 countries, including university research institutions, venture capital and startup-incubator networks, the Challenge attracted over 40 submissions from five continents. These solutions ranged from novel feed, feed additives and biomanufacturing to AI and SaaS data platforms, processing innovations and energy management systems. Nearly half were at commercial-ready maturity, reflecting a strong pipeline of scalable solutions rather than early-stage concepts.

Cintia Nunes, General Manager, Head of Asia, The Mills Fabrica said, “The next phase of climate innovation is not just about discovering new technologies but helping them scale in ways that create tangible change. DFI is an industry leader willing to put real supply-chain access and pilot pathways behind climate-tech innovators. We are committed to deepening this partnership with DFI and to working with more forward-looking partners, so that the most promising innovators get the partnerships, capital and pilots they need to translate their work to commercial impact.”

The Finalists: A Global Cohort Tackling Beef and Dairy’s Hardest Climate Problems
The finalists represent leading approaches to reducing ruminant emissions, including novel feed additives, synthetic biology, AI-enabled monitoring, genetic optimisation, and waste-to-renewable resources:

  • Provectus Algae (Australia): Creator of Surf’N’Turf®, a scalable seaweed-based feed supplement designed to reduce ruminant livestock methane emissions. Powered by Provectus Algae’s proprietary Precision Photosynthesis® and AI-enabled biomanufacturing platform, Surf’N’Turf® has demonstrated enteric methane reductions of up to 98% while improving feed efficiency and supporting lower-emission livestock systems.
  • AbacusBio (New Zealand): A genetics consultancy working in over 30 countries. Its Methane Sire Selection Tool is an app that generates a selection index to help select breeding sires for genetic methane reduction, balancing total and intensity emissions cuts with on-farm profitability metrics.
  • eVerse.AI (India): Their dual-track platform is revolutionising dairy sustainability and productivity, leveraging cutting-edge innovation. GreenCow harnesses methane measurement tech and eco-friendly interventions to generate verified carbon credits, empowering farmers to monetise their sustainable practices. ConnectedCow, a SaaS platform, integrates biometric ID with AI-driven insights to optimise milk yield, fertility, and herd health, providing a unified dashboard for monitoring productivity, breeding, and methane.
  • Kinava (South Korea): G2E Company (Green Waste to Energy) applies Hybrid Hydrothermal Carbonization to convert organic waste — livestock manure, food waste, wood waste, and sewage sludge — into odorless biofertilizer, biocoal, biocokes, biochar, and biogas in under three hours, using 70% less energy than conventional drying. Kinava’s first commercial plant has processed 100T/d pig manure since 2024, with a cassava-to-biocoal pilot plant also installed in Thailand in 2025.
Finalists pitched to a panel of leading academics and industry experts in ruminant nutrition, environmental science, agri-food sustainability, and corporate decarbonisation strategy. The pitching day brought together the DFI Management Committee, leading regional beef and dairy suppliers, academic experts, and ecosystem partners, enabling direct engagement between solution innovators and industry stakeholders.
In addition to formal pitches, all finalists presented their solutions through a dedicated Product and Technology Showcase, facilitating deeper discussions on pilot and deployment opportunities.

Erica Chan, Group Chief Legal, Sustainability and Corporate Affairs Officer, DFI Retail Group added: “We are pleased that this partnership with The Mills Fabrica has identified technologies with real commercial potential. Their global network and deep expertise in sustainability innovation helped us connect with a very strong cohort of climate-tech innovators. What impressed us most was the commercial readiness of the solutions. These are practical technologies with the potential to reduce emissions, strengthen supply chain resilience, and support more sustainable food systems.”

DFI Retail Group and The Mills Fabrica will continue to provide ongoing mentorship, ecosystem connections, and access to its global network, both to the winner and to the wider finalist cohort.

Hashtag: #DFIretailGroup #TheMillsFabrica #Sustainability

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

DFI Retail Group

DFI Retail Group is a leading Asian retailer driven by its purpose to “Sustainably Serve Asia for Generations with Everyday Moments”. At 31 December 2025, the Group and Maxim’s operated 7,580 outlets and employed more than 79,000 people across 12 markets. The Group is committed to delivering quality, value and service to consumers across the region through trusted brands, strong local market positions, and a broad retail ecosystem supported by extensive store networks, digital capabilities and efficient supply chains. The Group operates a portfolio of well-known brands across five key divisions: health and beauty, convenience, food, home furnishings and restaurants under Maxim’s.

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OOm Institute Calls for AI Fluency to Close Human Critical Thinking Gap

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SINGAPORE – Media OutReach Newswire – 10 June 2026 – OOm Institute, a Singapore-based AI and digital skills training provider, is calling for greater AI fluency as businesses adopt Generative AI and concerns grow over declining critical thinking and verification skills.

The rapid adoption of AI tools without sufficient verification, contextual understanding, or critical oversight is contributing to a growing “Human Critical Thinking Gap”.

Recent research from Professors Rick Dakan and Joseph Feller also corroborates this; only 8.7% of participants consistently verified high-stakes AI-generated claims before accepting them.

Beyond the Prompt: The Human-Centric Shift

While prompt engineering remains a foundational skill for today’s workforce, OOm Institute suggests the discipline must evolve beyond simple input mechanics.

“We are entering a false competence trap,” says Ian Cheow, CEO at OOm Institute. “People are learning how to prompt, but they aren’t learning how to make the right decisions. If you cannot spot when an AI’s logic fails, you aren’t using a tool, you are delegating your intelligence.”

The Warning: If You Let AI Think for You, You “De-skill”

Professionals who rely heavily on AI without developing critical evaluation skills risk “de-skilling”, where domain expertise erodes over time due to over-dependence on automated systems.

The concept of AI Fluency is built around three core capabilities:

  • Decision to Correct: The ability to determine when AI-generated output is sufficient and when it poses a risk that requires human revision or rejection.
  • Contextual Sovereignty: Ensuring human oversight remains central so AI outputs align with Singapore’s cultural, commercial, and ethical contexts.
  • Critical Inquiry: Moving beyond prompting to actively question assumptions, logic, accuracy, and completeness in AI-generated responses.

Real-World Practice vs Theory

As AI tools evolve rapidly, practitioners argue that effective AI capability cannot rely solely on static classroom theory. Real-world usage often involves changing workflows, unpredictable outputs, and context-specific decision-making that require continuous practical application and human judgment.

Maintaining AI fluency increasingly requires learning from practitioners actively applying these tools in commercial environments.

“At OOm Institute, our focus is on building practical decision-making in AI usage,” Mr Cheow added. “Our goal is to help professionals use AI with stronger critical thinking, clearer accountability, and practical business understanding.”
Hashtag: #aicourse #wsqaicourse #aisingapore #aifluency #aiskills




The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

OOm Institute

OOm Institute is a WSQ course provider in Singapore, supporting workforce upskilling in AI, Digital Marketing, and Soft Skills, backed by expert trainers and over 20 years of digital expertise. They deliver industry-oriented learning programmes designed to help organisations apply digital tools effectively in real-world business environments.

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Suanova, a Subsidiary of Yeebo, Signs Comprehensive Strategic Cooperation Agreement with InfiX.ai

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Advancing Deployment of Training and Inference Integrated AI Platforms in Healthcare Applications, Powered by Domestic High-Density Computing Infrastructure

HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 10 June 2026 – Yeebo (International Holdings) Limited (“Yeebo”; Stock Code: 00259.HK, together with its subsidiaries, the “Group”) is pleased to announce that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Suanova Technology Limited (“Suanova”), has entered into a comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement with InfiX.ai, a global leader in enterprise-grade generative AI (GenAI) infrastructure solutions. Leveraging Suanova’s Shanghai Cube, a domestically developed high-density computing infrastructure, the two parties will jointly advance the deployment of training and inference integrated AI platforms with continuous self-learning capabilities in healthcare applicatoins. As part of this collaboration, Suanova will contribute its expertise in domestic computing infrastructure by providing the core computing power and foundational support.

With healthcare as the initial focus, the two parties have already collaborated with leading medical institutions to conduct clinical validation in areas such as cancer GenAI, foundational medical Large Language Models (LLMs) and personalized cancer treatment planning.

Building Integrated Infrastructure for Medical AI with Shanghai Cube as the Foundation

The training and inference integrated AI platforms deployed under this collaboration are powered by Shanghai Cube, combined with InfiX.ai’s training, inference and multimodal AI capabilities. This integration delivers a truly unified hardware-software infrastructure tailored for medical AI applications.

Shanghai Cube, developed with the participation of Suanova, was among the earliest of its kind in China and is currently the highest-density domestically developed GPU supernode product. It adopts a high-density deployment architecture featuring 128 GPUs per rack with liquid cooling, enabling compact and efficient deployment of large-scale computing clusters. Shanghai Cube integrates a range of domestically produced core components, including liquid-cooling systems, high-performance parallel storage systems, retimers and motherboard capacitors. It provides a one-stop, highly efficient solution for the large-scale deployment of domestic computing systems and models.

Partnering with InfiX.ai to Build Enterprise-Grade AI Infrastructure

InfiX.ai is a research-driven AI infrastructure company serving global markets, with capabilities spanning IaaS, PaaS and MaaS. The company is building a Decentralized Co-GenAI Network that connects computing power, models, platforms and intelligent applications, with the aim of helping enterprises and organizations train, deploy and own their domain-specific AI based on proprietary data, expertise and business workflows.

InfiX.ai brings together world-class talent in AI research and industry deployment. The company is led by its Founder and Chief Scientist, Prof. Hongxia Yang, with Co-Founder and Vice President Haiqing Chen and Chief AI Architect Jianmin Wu forming the core management and technology team. Prof. Yang is also a Chair Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and is a globally recognized leader in artificial intelligence, with extensive experience spanning both academia and industry. She previously served as Head of LLMs in the at ByteDance (U.S.), AI Scientist and Director at Alibaba Group, Chief Data Scientist at Yahoo!, and Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Prof. Yang has published more than 150 papers and holds over 50 patents. She has also received numerous international honors, including the WAIC SAIL Award, the National Scientific and Technological Progress Award, and recognition as one of the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars worldwide.

By integrating InfiX.ai’s training and inference algorithms with Suanova’s high-performance computing platform, the solution significantly reduces memory usage and computing resource requirements. This enables higher throughput and supports training and deployment of larger-scale models under equivalent hardware configurations. The system is also capable of continuously capturing data for incremental training, integrating user feedback for fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, thereby ensuring that model performance evolves alongside changing business needs. Furthermore, the infrastructure supports local execution of the entire AI workflow – from training and fine-tuning to inference – thereby ensuring data security by design and meeting the stringent security requirements of sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government.

Mr. Daliang Chen, CEO of Suanova, said: “This partnership with InfiX.ai represents an important milestone in Suanova’s expansion into medical AI. Leveraging the Shanghai Cube high-density domestic computing platform, we aim to accelerate the adoption of medical AI in real-world clinical settings. This collaboration not only brings together the complementary strengths of both companies from a technological perspective, but also serves as a key step in advancing the domestic computing ecosystem. Looking ahead, we will continue to work closely with our partners to drive the deep integration of artificial intelligence across diverse industries.”

Hashtag: #Yeebo

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About Yeebo (International Holdings) Limited

Founded in 1988, Yeebo (International Holdings) Limited is a diversified electronic component company with a well-established presence in the global market. The Company’s core business spans flat panel displays, computing power and capacitors, serving a broad spectrum of industrial and consumer applications. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Yeebo operates its manufacturing operations primarily in the Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces, supporting a global sales network that ensures localized service and support for its international clientele.

In alignment with its long-term strategic vision, Yeebo is leveraging its robust operational foundation to expand into the Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) compute and related sectors. This initiative reflects the Company’s commitment to innovation and technological advancement, with the objective of positioning Yeebo as a leading and influential participant in the rapidly evolving AI industry across mainland China and Hong Kong.

About Suanova Technology Limited

Suanova, under Yeebo, is an innovative technology company focused on delivering independent, efficient, and accessible domestic AI computing services. Its business spans three core areas: computing power and cloud operations, computing technology development and computing industry investment. With branches in Hong Kong and Shanghai, it provides customers with better localized services. It is committed to transforming complex AI infrastructure into simple, efficient, and cost‑effective services through continuous technological innovation, with the goal of becoming a leading “infrastructure operator” in the AI era.

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KAST chooses Elliptic digital asset decisioning for global AML and sanctions compliance

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SINGAPORE – Media OutReach Newswire – 10 June 2026 – Elliptic, the global leader in digital asset decisioning, has equipped KAST, the global financial platform built on stablecoin rails , with the blockchain intelligence necessary to strengthen anti-money laundering and sanctions controls across its products and global footprint.

KAST has used Elliptic’s solutions since 2024 to screen wallets and monitor crypto transactions for indicators of financial crime as customers fund and use their KAST accounts. By integrating Elliptic’s blockchain intelligence into its risk and compliance stack, KAST has been able to identify high-risk activity in real-time, reduce exposure to sanctioned or illicit wallets and demonstrate robust controls to regulators and partners.

Founded in July 2024 by former Circle executive Raagulan Pathy, KAST provides USD-denominated accounts, global pay-ins and payouts to more than 170 countries, and a growing suite of consumer and business financial tools built on stablecoin rails rather than legacy settlement networks. With KAST, people can hold, send, and spend instantly while transacting with merchants and ATMs around the world.

Since launch, KAST has scaled to more than one million users and is processing about $5 billion in annualized transaction volume, reflecting the growing adoption of stablecoin-based financial services beyond trading and crypto-native use cases. In March, KAST announced a record $80 million Series A funding round, which is being deployed to expand across North America, Latin America and the Middle East. Elliptic’s analytics help KAST manage risk, applying a consistent, data-driven approach to AML and sanctions screening as the platform scales into new markets.

“Every time customers tap their card, send or receive transactions, they need to trust it’s safe,” said Pathy, Founder & CEO at KAST. “Our users rely on us for institution-grade security everywhere in the world. Elliptic is a key part of that promise. Their blockchain intelligence helps us detect fraud patterns, sanctioned activity and other red flags behind the scenes so that our customers feel safe and secure.”

“As stablecoin financial platforms like KAST reach more users, regulators and partners expect the same standard of financial crime controls that apply in traditional finance,” said James Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Elliptic.KAST has been building with compliance in mind from day one. Through this partnership, we are helping to ensure the platform can scale while meeting regulatory expectations for AML and sanctions risk.”

Elliptic’s analytics now underpin KAST’s financial crime controls. Working alongside the platform’s identity, fraud and transaction monitoring solutions, Elliptic supports a consistent, risk-based approach to onboarding, funding and card usage as the platform scales.

Hashtag: #Elliptic

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About Elliptic

Elliptic is the leader in digital asset decisioning, we have built the most comprehensive platform for efficiently extracting cryptoasset data and intelligence across blockchains with the greatest accuracy.

Our platform’s unrivalled uptime, scalability, depth and breadth of our data and intelligence means exacting organizations choose Elliptic for their compliance, risk management, intelligence operations and blockchain infrastructure needs.

Founded in 2013, Elliptic is headquartered in London with offices in New York, Washington D.C., Miami, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. To learn more, visit and follow us on and .

About KAST

KAST is a stablecoin-powered financial platform that connects digital assets with traditional finance, enabling 1 million+ people to send, receive and convert funds across borders, currencies and payment rails through a single app. The company focuses on helping individuals and businesses earn globally and spend locally by combining instant peer-to-peer transfers with compliant access to local bank payouts in supported markets. Visit www.kast.xyz.

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