It’s fourth period in the auto lab at Vel Phillips Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, and a dozen students maneuver between nearly as many cars.

At one bay, a junior adjusts the valves of an oxygen-acetylene torch and holds the flame to a suspended Subaru’s front axle to loosen its rusty bolts. Steps away, two classmates tease each other in Spanish as they finish replacing the brakes on a red Saab. Teacher Miles Tokheim moves calmly through the shop, checking students’ work and offering pointers.

After extensive renovations, the lab reopened last year with more room and tools for young mechanics-in-training. What visitors can’t see is the class recently got an upgrade, too: college credit.

Through dual enrollment, high schoolers who pass the course now earn five credits for free at Madison College and skip the class if they later enroll. Classes like these are increasingly common in Wisconsin and across the country. They’ve allowed more high schoolers to earn college credit, reducing their education costs and giving them a head start on their career goals.

Wisconsin lawmakers and education officials want more high schoolers to have this opportunity. But these classes need teachers with the qualifications of college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply.

That leaves many students — disproportionately, those in less-affluent areas — without classes that make a college education more attainable.

“What’s at stake is access to opportunity, especially for high school students at Title I, lower-income high schools, rural high schools … It’s really been an on-ramp for so many students,” said John Fink, who studies dual enrollment at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. “But we also know that many students are left behind.”

To teach the auto class, Tokheim had to apply to become a Madison College instructor. As a certified auto service technician with a master’s degree, the veteran teacher met the college’s requirements for the course.

But for many teachers, teaching dual enrollment would require enrolling in graduate school, even if they already have a master’s degree. That, school leaders say, is a hard sell, despite the state offering to reimburse districts for the cost. Teachers in Wisconsin often don’t make much more money teaching advanced courses the way they do in some other states, and adding these courses doesn’t raise a school’s state rating.

“You’re asking people who are well educated to begin with to go back to school, which takes time and effort, and their reward for that is they get to teach a dual-credit class,” said Mark McQuade, Appleton Area School District’s assistant superintendent of assessment, curriculum and instruction.

High Standards, Short Supply

Nationwide, the number of high schoolers earning college credit has skyrocketed in recent years. In Wisconsin, the tally has more than doubled, with students notching experience in subjects ranging from manufacturing to business.

Most earn credit from their local technical college without leaving their high school campus. In the 2023-24 school year, one in three community college students in the state was a high schooler.

Education and state leaders have welcomed the trend, pointing to the potential benefits: Students who take dual-enrollment classes are more likely to enroll in college after high school. Theycan save hundreds or thousands of dollars on college tuition and fees. If they do enroll in college, they spend less time completing a degree.

“It also proves to the kids — to some of our kids that are first-generation — that they can do college work,” McQuade said.

But not all students get these advantages. Many Wisconsin schools offer very few dual-enrollment courses, or none at all. A July Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis showed small, urban or high-poverty schools are least likely to offer the classes.

Wisconsin Watch talked to leaders in five school districts. All said the shortage of qualified teachers was one of the biggest barriers to growing their dual-enrollment programs.

In 2015, the Higher Learning Commission, which oversees and evaluates the state’s technical colleges, released new guidelines about instructor qualifications. The new policy required many of Wisconsin’s dual-enrollment teachers to have a master’s degree and at least 18 graduate credits in the subject they teach, just like college instructors.

In 2023, the commission walked back the new policy.

By then, colleges across the state had already adopted the higher standard.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin high schools have struggled to hire and retain teachers, even without college credit involved. Four in 10 new teachers stop teaching or leave the state within six years, a 2024 Department of Public Instruction analysis shows.

The subject-specific prerequisite is much different from the graduate education K-12 teachers have historically sought: the kind that would help them become principals or administrators, said Eric Conn, Green Bay Area Public Schools’ director of curricular pathways and post-secondary partnerships.

“To advance in education, it wasn’t about getting a master’s in a subject area. It was getting a master’s in education to develop into educational administration or educational technology,” Conn said. For teachers who already have a master’s degree, he said, going back to school just to teach one or two new classes is “a large ask.”

Funding Tempts Few

When the Higher Learning Commission announced the heightened requirements in 2015, leaders of the Wisconsin Technical College System sounded the alarm. They warned that 85 percent of the instructors currently teaching these classes could be disqualified, whittling students’ college credit opportunities.

Wisconsin education leaders called on the Legislature to allocate millions of dollars to help teachers get the training they’d need — and they agreed. In 2017, lawmakers created a grant program to reimburse school districts for teachers’ graduate tuition. But of the $500,000 available every year, hundreds of thousands go unused.

“Nobody’s ever, ever requested this funding and been denied because of a funding shortage,” said Tammie DeVooght Blaney, executive secretary of the Higher Educational Aids Board, which manages the grant.

Tuition and fees for a single graduate credit at a Universities of Wisconsin school can cost over $800, putting the total cost of 18 graduate credits at around $15,000. For teachers who don’t already have a master’s degree, the cost is even steeper. The state grant requires teachers or districts to front the cost and apply for reimbursement yearly, with no guarantee they’ll get it.

A handful of Green Bay teachers have used the grant, Conn said, but many just aren’t interested in returning to school, even if it’s free.

The district offers 50 dual-enrollment courses, but he’d like to offer classes in more core subjects, which help students meet general college education requirements. There just aren’t enough teachers qualified to teach college sciences and math to offer the same options across the district’s four high schools.

Teachers are busy, and not just in the classroom, said Jon Shelton, president of AFT-Wisconsin, one of the state’s teachers unions. Many already spend extra hours coaching, grading or leading after-school activities. Those who do go back to school typically enroll in one class at a time, he said, meaning they could be studying for several years.

Pros and Cons

The financial perks for teachers returning to school for dual-enrollment credentials are dubious at best.

Some teachers get a salary bump for obtaining a master’s degree, and some earn modest bonuses for teaching dual enrollment. But many teachers make no more than they would have without the extra training.

“There’s no incentive,” said Tokheim, the Madison auto instructor, who receives a $50 yearly stipend for teaching the college course. In contrast to his standard classes, his dual-enrollment class required him to attend two kinds of training.

There’s little incentive for schools either. They receive no extra state funding to offer college-level courses. Plus, the classes don’t factor into their state report card score, which measures students’ standardized test performance and graduation preparation, among other things.

Leaders at Central High School in Sheboygan wish it did. At that school, where the majority of students are Latino and almost all are low-income, one in three students took dual-enrollment courses in the 2023-24 school year. Still, the state gave the school a failing grade.

“It’s an afterthought in our report card, and it’s always the thing that we can celebrate,” Principal Joshua Kestell said.

So why would a teacher take on the added schooling?

“It’s good for kids,” Tokheim said. “That’s why they get us teachers, because we care too much.”

Other potential draws: the challenge of teaching more rigorous courses and the opportunity to collaborate with college instructors.

Heather Fellner-Spetz retired two years ago from teaching English at Sevastopol High School in Sturgeon Bay. She taught college-level oral communication classes for 10 years before she retired. When the Higher Learning Commission set the heightened requirements, she was allowed to continue teaching dual enrollment while she studied for more graduate credits.

“There wasn’t much I didn’t enjoy about teaching it. It was just fabulous,” Fellner-Spetz said.

She especially liked having a college professor observe her class, and she said it was good for the students, too. “When they had other people come into the room and watch the lesson or watch them perform, it just ups the ante on pressure.”

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether it’s necessary for dual-enrollment teachers to have the same credentials as college professors.

“Folks running these programs generally would say that teaching a quality college course to a high school student requires a unique skill set that blends high school and college teaching, and that is not necessarily captured by the traditional (graduate coursework) standard,” Fink said.

Wisconsin educators are divided on that question. Fox Valley Technical College has kept the higher standard, limiting the number of Appleton teachers who qualify. McQuade, the Appleton leader, questions those “restrictions,” saying he believes his teachers are well qualified to teach college-level courses. A different standard tied to student performance, for example, could let his district offer more classes across each of its schools.

Schauna Rasmussen, dean of early college and workforce strategy at Madison College, said the answer isn’t to lower the standard, but to help more teachers reach it.

In October, a group of Republican Wisconsin lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at making it easier for students to find dual-enrollment opportunities. It would create a portal for families to view options and streamline application deadlines, among other changes.

It doesn’t address the shortage of qualified teachers.

“Separate legislation would likely have to be introduced addressing expanding the pool of teachers for those programs,” Chris Gonzalez, communications director for lead author State Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, wrote in an email.

So far, no such legislation has been introduced.

Why Singaporean travellers are choosing intentional travel, and paying more for it

For years, travel was about efficiency: tick off as many sights as you can, squeeze as much value as possible into a fixed number of days, and move on quickly to the next destination. But for a growing group of travellers, especially post-pandemic, that formula no longer satisfies.

Instead, more people are turning towards intentional travel, a term that refers to curated journeys designed beyond the typical packaged tours. Such tours place importance on meaning, depth, and mindfulness at their core. These travellers are willing to slow down, return to the same place multiple times, and even pay a premium—not for luxury, but for care, context, and connection.

Companies like V Folks, Kitabi Travel, and SoulTrips by Druk Asia are meeting this demand, offering plant-based culinary immersion, hands-on cultural craft, and spiritually mindful journeys. We spoke to the founders to uncover why Singaporeans are increasingly drawn to travel that moves beyond ticking boxes — and how small, curated trips are reshaping what it means to explore the world.

V Folks: Plant-Based Travel with purpose

One company leaning firmly into values-led travel is V Folks, a curated travel company founded in September 2023 by 39-year-old Jay Yeo. Specialising in premium vegetarian and vegan travel, V Folks builds itineraries around cultural immersion, hands-on experiences, and slower-paced journeys. While plant-based travellers form the core audience, 25% of its guests are non-vegetarians, drawn by the quality of food and the depth of experiences offered.

Before starting V Folks, Jay worked across finance, project coordination, and volunteering, including with Youth Corps Singapore National Council. A post-COVID period of soul-searching and backpacking – combined with his own plant-based lifestyle – led a close friend to suggest he channel his talent for planning meaningful trips into a full-fledged travel company catered to people with plant-based diets. 

“At its core, V Folks was started to breathe a fresh air of life into people worn down by the daily grind,” Jay shared.

Jay believes V Folks is Singapore’s first travel company dedicated entirely to plant-based itineraries. Previously, the co-founder shared that vegetarian/vegan travellers often relied on Malaysia-based operators or mainstream agencies that struggled to deliver on dietary and experiential needs. While initial scepticism about V Folks existed, word-of-mouth quickly grew, with many customers returning alongside family and friends.

Today, V Folks runs two to four Malaysia trips monthly, ranging from day tours to a spanning a few days, apart from regular overseas departures to Thailand, Vietnam, and China. Guests range from their 30s to 70s, with more than half being over their 50s, plus a growing number of families and younger travellers drawn to hiking and nature-based experiences. Marketing is produced in both English and Chinese to reach a diverse clientele, including members of churches and temples, reflecting broader shifts towards health-conscious, plant-based travel.

Even V Folks’ short trips carry depth: a one-day Kulai trip under $90 includes a visit to the Hakka association to learn local history, while overseas itineraries feature tea-plucking in Hangzhou or family-style cooking classes in Guangzhou to revive hands-on bonding often lost in urban life. 

What sets V Folks apart is its unhurried pace and immersive approach, Jay shared. In Yunnan, for example, guests visit the Naxi tribe, entering the home of a former village chief—a space rarely accessible to typical tour buses. Travellers can choose to dress in traditional attire, learn Dongba scripts, and participate in ancient food-making practices. Tie-dyeing with the Bai ethnic tribe allows guests to leave with a tangible, handmade memory rather than a mere souvenir.

“Being younger than mainstream travel planners, we are more adventurous in exploring deeper corners and experiences that most tourists miss,” Jay explained.

Every itinerary is personally scouted by Jay and his co-founder, from restaurants that cater to strict dietary requirements to immersive cultural activities that foster connection. Local partners and guides play a crucial role; their energy and vitality shape the guest experience, making even routine moments meaningful.

Private trips are a growing segment, ranging from family getaways during school holidays to spiritual groups or corporate bonding trips, all aligned with the plant-based philosophy. Across all journeys, mindfulness and conscious intention guide planning, ensuring that participants return refreshed, invigorated, and shifted in perspective.

Jay shared that although his tours are typically 10–15% pricier than typical vegetarian tours, V Folks emphasises transparency and value through its specially selected vegetarian restaurants. Jay shared that there are no hidden charges or coerced spending stops, with all costs included upfront. For example, a standard eight-day trip starts at S$1,899.

Looking ahead, V Folks plans to expand short getaways and hiking-focused itineraries, reflecting Jay’s view that modern society’s lethargy and burnout create a growing need for travel that reconnects people with nature, community, and themselves.

SoulTrips by Druk Asia: Travel for the soul

If V Folks reflects values-led living, SoulTrips by Druk Asia embodies the emotional and spiritual dimension of travel — what its founder calls “travel for the soul.”

Founded in 2010 by Joni Herison, Druk Asia began by promoting Bhutan, a country that resists checklist tourism and encourages travellers to slow down, reflect, and reconnect. According to Joni, back then, only around 200 Singaporeans visited Bhutan annually; today, that number has grown to 7,000–8,000, helped by direct flights and Druk Asia’s role as General Sales Agent for Drukair since 2012. About 95% of Druk Asia’s journeys to Bhutan are private tours, while its public tour groups are capped at 10–12 guests.

For Joni, success is measured not in numbers but in transformation. According to Joni, many travellers often return with a slower perception of time, renewed priorities, and a lighter emotional state. Bhutan’s old-school depth and authenticity – from centuries-old suspension bridges to passionate local guides – are central to this shift. 

Since 2010, Druk Asia has brought 21,000–22,000 travellers to Bhutan, ranging from young adults to retirees, often travelling as families. Many describe profoundly moving moments, from quiet reflection to tears at Tiger’s Nest, overwhelmed by Bhutan’s unfiltered energy. Some experiences have even been life-changing, such as a traveller leaving her consultancy job to work with Mountain Hazelnuts and later co-creating hands-on agricultural tours. An 11-day trip to Bhutan starts at S$4,890 per person, excluding flights.

“I think that is the travel that we prefer: to bring people surprises that they didn’t even expect on a trip… sometimes you may even bump into the King of Bhutan and have a short conversation with him,” founder Joni said. 

By 2023, in response to demand for transformative journeys beyond Bhutan, the company launched SoulTrips, offering curated experiences in Asia, Central Asia, and Europe. Each itinerary takes six months to a year to plan, with moments of surprise deliberately built in to preserve the joy of discovery.

SoulTrips works closely within local ecosystems, collaborating with tourism boards, guide associations, and communities. Apart from their own curated tours, SoulTrips also partners with international travel agency Europamundo, allowing travellers to explore Europe with guided flexibility rather than ticking off sights on a checklist.

Closer to home, SoulTrips’ S$870 Penang: Community & Wellbeing Tour (4D3N) blends heritage, tradition, and wellbeing in Malaysia’s multicultural island state. Organised with the Ningpo Guild Singapore, the itinerary frames Penang’s social fabric as a living system of care—from clan houses and temples to philanthropic institutions and Chinese associations. Travellers explore historic sites such as Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion (aka Blue Mansion) and Penang Buddhist Association, participate in traditional Chinese medicine sessions, and experience ancestral clan heritage — all in a deliberately slower, reflective way. 

“People ask why Singaporeans would want to go to Penang with us when they can just eat Penang food,” added Florence Ang, Marketing Director. The answer is the difference: understanding why places matter, not just what they offer.

Mental wellness, for SoulTrips, isn’t a retreat added on but cultivated naturally through mindful presence in each trip, Joni said. Each journey sparks curiosity, joy, and awareness of the moment, helping travellers reconnect with themselves, others, and the world around them.

Looking ahead, SoulTrips is expanding thoughtfully, with philanthropy-driven journeys to Bhutan and a holistic wellness partnership with Oriental Remedies launching in 2026. Travellers will receive pre- and post-trip wellness assessments, framing wellness as a journey rather than a destination. Across all initiatives, the ethos remains the same: to move travellers away from ticking boxes and towards journeys that leave them lighter, more curious, and quietly transformed.

“That’s the work of human being, right? We should just be being in the moment but we end up becoming human doing, so that our 24 hours a day is doing things because that’s what we are trained to do,” said Florence.

Kitabi Travel: Curating Japan beyond the guidebook

Another agency embracing intentional, deeply curated travel is Kitabi Travel, founded in 2023 by Heidi Tan, the former founder of FLOR Patisserie. A trained pastry chef, Heidi ran FLOR for 15 years, crafting Japanese-inspired pastries that celebrated seasonal fruits and building close relationships with Japanese farms and artisans — informal connections that now form the backbone of Kitabi Travel’s unique itineraries.

Kitabi Travel grew organically from a 2019 baking class in collaboration with Japanese pastry chefs in FLOR, organised in partnership with the Kobe prefectural government that wanted to share Japanese fruits in Singapore. Guests were fascinated by the artistry behind the Japanese seasonal pastry, and in order to have access to fresher ingredients, suggested food trips to Japan be held instead. 

Even when the collaboration paused during COVID-19, demand for more collaborations persisted after the pandemic. 

Then, in the spring of 2023, Kitabi Travel was officially born, with Heidi hosting the first overseas tour to Kobe, where travellers made and sampled a range of traditional Japanese sweets.

In sweets tours, participants immersed themselves in making sweets such as cookies, cakes and other daifuku (sweet rice cakes). Other tours that Kitabi Travel offers include Sake & Food, Food & Crafts, Fermented Food across Japan.

Rather than relying on traditional travel agents, Kitabi partners with a Japan-based PR specialist embedded in the local F&B scene, granting clients access to experiences most tourists never see: learning directly from professional chefs inside their kitchens, reserving entire small restaurants, or visiting rural pottery studios where artisans teach personally. Heidi personally scouts venues, liaises with artisans, and with her fluency in both Japanese and English, ensures language and cultural barriers are bridged.

The philosophy at Kitabi Travel is simple: immersive, out-of-the-ordinary experiences. Tours travel in small groups, keeping interactions intimate and flexible. Guests might make miso in Kobe and take it home to ferment, harvest tea leaves in Nagoya under a farmer’s guidance, or craft pottery in countryside studios. Each activity is tactile, memory-rich, and designed to engage all the senses, leaving participants with lasting personal connections to both craft and culture.

“We will be drinking tea, living tea, breathing tea… it’s about the whole process, not just the end product,” Heidi explains.

Since its inaugural spring tour in 2023, Kitabi has expanded to seasonal offerings such as early summer tea harvest and autumn pottery tours. By 2025, Kitabi had hosted 152 guests across nine tours, with nearly half returning for a second experience. The agency attracts higher-income travellers seeking depth, culture, and authenticity over standard sightseeing. For example, the five-day Kagoshima tour, priced at $4,600, typically attracts older travellers in their 30s to 50s seeking a more luxurious, refined experience.

Heidi also noted that Japanese prefectural governments have increasingly shown strong interest in Kitabi’s tours, which they perceive attract mindful travellers who demonstrate respect for local culture — a contrast to mass, low-cost tourism.

Running intimate tours requires careful planning: Japan’s punctuality culture, inaccessible rural locations, and traditional ryokan accommodations demand pre-trip guidance and flexible arrangements, such as private onsen windows to balance comfort with authenticity.

Each itinerary is designed to encourage curiosity, reflection, and personal engagement, Heidi shared. Guests aren’t just visiting Japan — they’re meeting people, sharing stories, and understanding local traditions in ways that foster deeper appreciation.

Looking ahead, Kitabi is launching a Kids Camp in rural Kagoshima in September, bringing parents and primary school children together for bamboo harvesting, cooking bamboo rice, and rice planting. The program reflects the brand’s ethos: travel as education, connection, and shared growth. 

“I want to see more mindful Singaporeans living intentionally and appreciating nature, starting young,” said Heidi.

Reflecting on her entrepreneurial journey, Heidi shares that passion accounts for only 10% of success; the rest comes from hard work, perseverance, and knowing when to walk away from what isn’t working. 

More meaning, less mileage

Across these three agencies, the message is clear: intentional travel isn’t just about doing less — it’s about doing things differently. Whether it’s tasting, crafting, hiking, or meditating, travellers are seeking experiences that leave a lasting emotional and intellectual impact rather than a collection of photos or stamps on a passport.

As travellers grow more discerning, they are choosing depth over density, meaning over mileage, and journeys that linger long after they return home. And for a growing number of them, that difference is worth paying for, in a cozier, curated group setting that prioritises connection, discovery, and mindful presence.

• Learn about V Folks here.
• Learn about Druk Asia’s SoulTrips here.
• Learn about Kitabi Travel here.
• Read more stories we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: V Folks, Druk Asia, Kitabi Travel

The deep learning revolution has a curious blind spot: the spreadsheet. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have mastered the nuances of human prose and image generators have conquered the digital canvas, the structured, relational data that underpins the global economy — the rows and columns of ERP systems, CRMs, and financial ledgers — has so far been treated as just another file format similar to text or PDFs.

That’s left enterprises to forecast business outcomes using the typical bespoke, labor-intensive data science process of manual feature engineering and classic machine learning algorithms that predate modern deep learning.

But now Fundamental, a San Francisco-based AI firm co-founded by DeepMind alumni, is launching today with $255 million in total funding to bridge this gap.

Emerging from stealth, the company is debuting NEXUS, a Large Tabular Model (LTM) designed to treat business data not as a simple sequence of words, but as a complex web of non-linear relationships.

The tech: moving beyond sequential logic

Most current AI models are built on sequential logic — predicting the next word in a sentence or the next pixel in a frame.

However, enterprise data is inherently non-sequential. A customer’s churn risk isn’t just a timeline; it’s a multi-dimensional intersection of transaction frequency, support ticket sentiment, and regional economic shifts. Existing LLMs struggle with this because they are poorly suited to the size and dimensionality constraints of enterprise-scale tables.

“The most valuable data in the world lives in tables and until now there has been no good foundation model built specifically to understand it,” said Jeremy Fraenkel, CEO and Co-founder of Fundamental.

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Fraenkel emphasized that while the AI world is obsessed with text, audio, and video, tables remain the largest modality for enterprises. “LLMs really cannot handle this type of data very well,” he explained, “and enterprises currently rely on very old-school machine learning algorithms in order to make predictions.”

NEXUS was trained on billions of real-world tabular datasets using Amazon SageMaker HyperPod. Unlike traditional XGBoost or Random Forest models, which require data scientists to manually define features — the specific variables the model should look at — NEXUS is designed to ingest raw tables directly.

It identifies latent patterns across columns and rows that human analysts might miss, effectively reading the hidden language of the grid to understand non-linear interactions.

The tokenization trap

A primary reason traditional LLMs fail at tabular data is how they process numbers. Fraenkel explains that LLMs tokenize numbers the same way they tokenize words, breaking them into smaller chunks. “The problem is they apply the same thing to numbers. Tables are, by and large, all numerical,” Fraenkel noted. “If you have a number like 2.3, the ‘2’, the ‘.’, and the ‘3’ are seen as three different tokens. That essentially means you lose the understanding of the distribution of numbers. It’s not like a calculator; you don’t always get the right answer because the model doesn’t understand the concept of numbers natively.”

Furthermore, tabular data is order-invariant in a way that language is not. Fraenkel uses a healthcare example to illustrate: “If I give you a table with hundreds of thousands of patients and ask you to predict which of them has diabetes, it shouldn’t matter if the first column is height and the second is weight, or vice versa.”

While LLMs are highly sensitive to the order of words in a prompt, NEXUS is architected to understand that shifting column positions should not impact the underlying prediction.

Operating at the predictive layer

Recent high-profile integrations, such as Anthropic’s Claude appearing directly within Microsoft Excel, have suggested that LLMs are already solving tables.

However, Fraenkel distinguishes Fundamental’s work as operating at a fundamentally different layer: the predictive layer. “What they are doing is essentially at the formula layer—formulas are text, they are like code,” he said. “We aren’t trying to allow you to build a financial model in Excel. We are helping you make a forecast.”

NEXUS is designed for split-second decisions where a human isn’t in the loop, such as a credit card provider determining if a transaction is fraudulent the moment you swipe.

While tools like Claude can summarize a spreadsheet, NEXUS is built to predict the next row—whether that is an equipment failure in a factory or the probability of a patient being readmitted to a hospital.

Architecture and availability

The core value proposition of Fundamental is the radical reduction of time-to-insight. Traditionally, building a predictive model could take months of manual labor.

“You have to hire an army of data scientists to build all of those data pipelines to process and clean the data,” Fraenkel explained. “If there are missing values or inconsistent data, your model won’t work. You have to build those pipelines for every single use case.”

Fundamental claims NEXUS replaces this entire manual process with just one line of code. Because the model has been pre-trained on a billion tables, it doesn’t require the same level of task-specific training or feature engineering that traditional algorithms do.

As Fundamental moves from its stealth phase into the broader market, it does so with a commercial structure designed to bypass the traditional friction of enterprise software adoption.

The company has already secured several seven-figure contracts with Fortune 100 organizations, a feat facilitated by a strategic go-to-market architecture where Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves as the seller of record on the AWS Marketplace.

This allows enterprise leaders to procure and deploy NEXUS using existing AWS credits, effectively treating predictive intelligence as a standard utility alongside compute and storage. For the engineers tasked with implementation, the experience is high-impact but low-friction; NEXUS operates via a Python-based interface at a purely predictive layer rather than a conversational one.

Developers connect raw tables directly to the model and label specific target columns—such as a credit default probability or a maintenance risk score—to trigger the forecast. The model then returns regressions or classifications directly into the enterprise data stack, functioning as a silent, high-speed engine for automated decision-making rather than a chat-based assistant.

The societal stakes: beyond the bottom line

While the commercial implications of demand forecasting and price prediction are clear, Fundamental is emphasizing the societal benefit of predictive intelligence.

The company highlights key areas where NEXUS can prevent catastrophic outcomes by identifying signals hidden in structured data.

By analyzing sensor data and maintenance records, NEXUS can predict failures like pipe corrosion. The company points to the Flint water crisis — which cost over $1 billion in repairs — as an example where predictive monitoring could have prevented life-threatening contamination.

Similarly, during the COVID-19 crisis, PPE shortages cost hospitals $323 billion in a single year. Fundamental argues that by using manufacturing and epidemiological data, NEXUS can predict shortages 4-6 weeks before peak demand, triggering emergency manufacturing in time to save lives.

On the climate front, NEXUS aims to provide 30-60 day flood and drought predictions, such as for the 2022 Pakistan floods which caused $30 billion in damages.

Finally, the model is being used to predict hospital readmission risks by analyzing patient demographics and social determinants. As the company puts it: “A single mother working two jobs shouldn’t end up back in the ER because we failed to predict she’d need follow-up care.”

Performance vs. latency

In the enterprise world, the definition of better varies by industry. For some, it is speed; for others, it is raw accuracy.

“In terms of latency, it depends on the use case,” Fraenkel explains. “If you are a researcher trying to understand what drugs to administer to a patient in Africa, latency doesn’t matter as much. You are trying to make a more accurate decision that can end up saving the most lives possible.”

In contrast, for a bank or hedge fund, even a marginal increase in accuracy translates to massive value.

“Increasing the prediction accuracy by half a percent is worth billions of dollars for a bank,” Fraenkel says. “For different use cases, the magnitude of the percentage increase changes, but we can get you to a better performance than what you have currently.”

Ambitious vision receives big backing

The $225 million Series A, led by Oak HC/FT with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and Battery Ventures, signals high-conviction belief that tabular data is the next great frontier.

Notable angel investors including leaders from Perplexity, Wiz, Brex, and Datadog further validate the company’s pedigree.

Annie Lamont, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Oak HC/FT, articulated the sentiment: “The significance of Fundamental’s model is hard to overstate—structured, relational data has yet to see the benefits of the deep learning revolution.”

Fundamental is positioning itself not just as another AI tool, but as a new category of enterprise AI. With a team of approximately 35 based in San Francisco, the company is moving away from the bespoke model era and toward a foundation model era for tables.

“Those traditional algorithms have been the same for the last 10 years; they are not improving,” Fraenkel said. “Our models keep improving. We are doing the same thing for tables that ChatGPT did for text.”

Partnering with AWS

Through a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), NEXUS is integrated directly into the AWS dashboard. AWS customers can deploy the model using their existing credits and infrastructure. Fraenkel describes this as a “very unique agreement,” noting Fundamental is one of only two AI companies to have established such a deep, multi-layered partnership with Amazon.

One of the most significant hurdles for enterprise AI is data privacy. Companies are often unwilling to move sensitive data to a third-party infrastructure.

To solve this, Fundamental and Amazon achieved a massive engineering feat: the ability to deploy fully encrypted models—both the architecture and the weights—directly within the customer’s own environment. “Customers can be confident the data sits with them,” Fraenkel said. “We are the first, and currently only, company to have built such a solution.”

Fundamental’s emergence is an attempt to redefine the OS for business decisions. If NEXUS performs as advertised—handling financial fraud, energy prices, and supply chain disruptions with a single, generalized model—it will mark the moment where AI finally learned to read the spreadsheets that actually run the world. The Power to Predict is no longer about looking at what happened yesterday; it is about uncovering the hidden language of tables to determine what happens tomorrow.

Conpet, Romania’s national oil pipeline operator, has disclosed that a cyberattack disrupted its business systems and took down the company’s website on Tuesday.

Conpet operates nearly 4,000 kilometers of pipeline network, supplying domestic and imported crude oil and derivatives, including gasoline and liquid ethane, to refineries nationwide.

In a Wednesday press release, the company said the incident affected its corporate IT infrastructure but didn’t disrupt its operations or its ability to fulfill its contractual obligations.

Conpet added that the cyberattack also took down its website and that it’s now investigating the incident and restoring affected systems with the help of national cybersecurity authorities.

The pipeline operator has also notified the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) and filed a criminal complaint regarding the incident.

“We note that the operational technologies (SCADA System and Telecommunications System) were not affected, so the company’s core business, consisting of the transport of crude oil and gasoline through the National Oil Transport System, is operating normally and there are no disruptions in its operation,” it said. “As a result of this incident, the company’s website www.conpet.ro cannot be accessed during this period.”

While the company has yet to disclose the nature of the cyberattack, the Qilin ransomware gang has claimed responsibility and added Conpet to their dark web leak site earlier today.

​The threat actors also claim they’ve stolen nearly 1TB of documents from Conpet’s compromised systems and leaked over a dozen photos of internal documents containing financial information and passport scans as proof of the breach.

Qilin emerged in August 2022 as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation under the “Agenda” name. Over the last four years, it has claimed responsibility for nearly 400 victims, including high-profile organizations such as Nissan, Japanese beer company Asahi, publishing giant Lee Enterprises, pathology services provider Synnovis, and Australia’s Court Services Victoria.

BleepingComputer reached out to Conpet with questions about the incident, but a response was not immediately available.

This cyberattack follows ransomware attacks on Romanian Waters (Romania’s water management authority) and Oltenia Energy Complex (the country’s largest coal-based energy producer) in December.

In December 2024, Electrica Group (a major Romanian electricity supplier and distributor) was also breached in a Lynx ransomware attack, while over 100 Romanian hospitals were knocked offline in February 2024 after a Backmydata ransomware attack took down their healthcare management systems.

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The Trump administration announced this week the U.S. government would work to build a $11.7 billion stockpile of critical minerals. That’s the headline; the subtext is more intriguing.

The stockpile initiative, branded as Project Vault, is the latest attempt by the administration to secure supplies of critical minerals for U.S. manufacturers and what President Donald Trump says will ensure “American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage.”

It follows recent investments from the administration into rare earth producers, including equity stakes in miners USA Rare Earth and MP Materials.

Individually, they can be interpreted as an administration taking steps to calm a part of the market that has been roiled by its own trade wars. Collectively, they’re an admission, however tacit or subconscious, that the future relies on electric technologies, including electric vehicles and wind turbines.

In his announcement, Trump alluded to the world’s dependence on China for a slew of critical minerals. Over the last year-plus, China has wielded its dominance to counter tariff threats from the Trump administration, restricting exports of rare earth metals and lithium battery materials to the United States. Eventually, China relented, but the episode made clear who held the trump card.

The spat also revealed just how integral critical minerals are to modern economies. Trump likened the new stockpile to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve maintained by the Department of Energy, which was set up in the wake of the oil embargo in the early 1970s.

“Just as we have long had a strategic petroleum reserve and a stockpile of critical minerals for national defense, we’re now creating this reserve for American industry, so we don’t have any problems,” Trump said.

The oil reserve isn’t going away, but it’s not as important as it once was, diminished by productive U.S. oil wells and the increasing share of the energy market taken by solar, wind, and batteries. (Solar and wind continue to dominate new electric generating capacity, while more than 25% of new cars sold worldwide were EVs or plug-in hybrids.)

It’s not clear exactly which minerals will go into the reserve; Bloomberg reported that gallium and cobalt will be included. It’s possible that others like copper and nickel might get thrown in as well, though they weren’t mentioned.

The size of the investment is notable. The U.S. Export-Import Bank is providing a $10 billion loan, with private capital rounding out the rest. That’s about half the value of the oil currently in the Strategic Oil Reserve going toward a market that’s 1% the size of the global oil market, as Bloomberg columnist David Fickling pointed out.

The mismatch is either typical Trump bluster or an acknowledgement that the market for critical minerals is going to expand significantly in the coming years. 

It is possible it’s both, with a greater chance it is the latter.

Much of the growth in critical minerals comes from clean energy technologies and EVs; without them, the market won’t be as constrained as experts have predicted. Demand for electronics, including data centers, will play a role, but more than half of global growth in rare earth element demand is expected to come from electric vehicles and wind turbines, according to the IEA. For cobalt and lithium, the figures are even more skewed, with EVs representing the vast majority of growth through 2050.

The Trump administration hasn’t been quiet about its distain for clean energy technologies, preferring to bet on the status quo with fossil fuels. But the rest of the world is continuing to move toward solar, wind, and batteries, driving up demand for critical minerals. The new stockpile shows that markets can be hard to ignore.

However, rendered here in Motorola’s Watch app, everything looks fun and easy! Motorola (and Polar, I guess) uses Apple’s “close your rings” approach, with active minutes, steps, and calories. I particularly like that you can now use Polar’s sleep tracking with a cheaper Android watch. Polar takes into account sleep time, solidity (whether or not your sleep was interrupted), and regeneration to give you a Nightly Recharge Status.

You can still click through and see your ANS, but there’s a lot more context surrounding it. Also, the graphs are prettier. I compared the sleep, heart rate, and stress measurements to my Oura Ring 4, and I found no big discrepancies. The Moto Watch tended to be a little bit more generous in my sleep and activity measurements (7 hours and 21 minutes of sleep instead of 7 hours and 13 minutes, or 3,807 steps as compared to 3,209), but that’s usual for lower-end fitness trackers that have fewer and less-sensitive sensors.

On that note, I do have one major hardware gripe. Onboard GPS is meant to make it easier to just run out the door and start your watch. I didn’t find this to be the case. Whatever processor is in the watch (Motorola has conveniently chosen not to reveal this), it’s just really slow to connect to satellites and iffy whenever it does. This isn’t a huge deal when I’m just walking my dog or lifting weights in my living room, but it constantly cuts out when I’m outside and doesn’t have the ability to fill in the blanks, as another, more expensive fitness tracker would do.

It’s just really annoying to constantly get pinged about satellite loss and to have a quarter-mile or a half-mile cut out of your runs. That’s how I know the speaker works—it was constantly telling me it lost satellite connection during activities.

Finally, the screen and buttons are really sensitive. It does give you an option to lock the screen, but even then, I found myself accidentally unlocking it from time to time and turning the recording off when I didn’t mean to.

As I write this, I have seven different smartwatches from different brands sitting on my desk. If you’re looking for a cheap, attractive, and effective Android-compatible smartwatch, I would say that the CMF Watch 3 Pro is your best choice. However, I do think the integration with Polar was well done, and the price point is not that bad. I’m definitely keeping an eye out for what Motorola might have to offer in the future.