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DXC Technology and Manchester United Foundation Launch Digital Futures Academy to Educate and Inspire Young People

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DXC Technology and Manchester United Foundation Launch Digital Futures Academy to Educate and Inspire Young People

–  Multiyear Initiative to expand the technology capabilities of young people in Greater Manchester and increase the talent pipeline in the tech sector

–  Supports local government strategy to transform Manchester into UK technology powerhouse

DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) and Manchester United Foundation have launched the DXC Digital Futures Academy, a four-year education program for secondary-school students in the Greater Manchester area.

Developing key social and technical skills, the Academy strives to support and empower young people, connecting them to opportunities they may otherwise not have access to, enhancing their career prospects, and shaping the future of work.

In the first wave, 50 students aged 12-13 years old will be selected for the four-year educational programme. They will be taught technology skills spanning a number of key areas including automation, big data, virtual reality, and security, as well as professional development skills.

The curriculum of the Digital Futures Academy has been co-created by DXC’s technology experts, Manchester United Foundation, and local teacher advisory groups. Together, they will use mentoring, personal development, and practical sessions to build the social leaders of the future. At the end of the program, students will be supported with pathways into further education, colleges, apprenticeships, and employment.

“We are proud to partner with Manchester United Foundation to use our technology skills to drive positive impact in local communities,” said Mary Finch, Executive Vice President, and Chief Human Resources Officer of DXC Technology. “With the Digital Futures Academy, our colleagues will use their energy, passion and technical expertise to educate and inspire young people in their academic and professional journeys.”

“This project is a year in the making and we are witnessing the start of an initiative that will demonstrate a long-term commitment to the 50 young people involved,” said John Shiels MBE, Chief Executive of Manchester United Foundation. “It demonstrates real collaboration between ourselves, teachers and DXC and it is hoped that by the end of the four-year programme, all involved will be in a position of choice as to what their adult pathway may look like.”

In addition to being Manchester United’s Digital Transformation Partner and Principal Shirt Sleeve Partner, DXC is the Presenting Partner of Manchester United Foundation. In this role, DXC is focussed on using technology to educate and inspire a new generation of STEM students. DXC and Manchester United Foundation will work closely with local government authorities, including Manchester City Council, to support the city in its mission to become a technology powerhouse. By introducing the students to key skills required in the technology sector, the Academy will help build a future pipeline of local digital talent.

Manchester has one of the most significant digital and creative sectors in Europe. The opportunities for talented young people with tech skills are growing all the time,” said Cllr. Bev Craig, Leader of Manchester City Council. “The Digital Futures Academy is perfectly aligned with our strategy of supporting our young people, especially those who might not previously have seen the benefits of such opportunities, to get equipped with the skills they need to succeed in key growth sectors in a thriving and inclusive economy.”

The Digital Futures Academy is one of a number of social impact initiatives that DXC is running globally. In October 2023, DXC announced the expansion of its DXC Dandelion Programme helping neurodivergent individuals to build careers in the IT industry.

Schools taking part in the Digital Futures Academy include:

1) Stretford High School, 2) Great Academy Ashton, 3) Middleton Technology School, 4) Manchester Academy, 5) Whalley Range 11-18 High School, 6) Levenshulme High School

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) helps global companies run their mission-critical systems and operations while modernizing IT, optimizing data architectures, and ensuring security and scalability across public, private and hybrid clouds. The world’s largest companies and public sector organizations trust DXC to deploy services to drive new levels of performance, competitiveness, and customer experience across their IT estates. Learn more about how we deliver excellence for our customers and colleagues at DXC.com.

About Manchester United Foundation

Manchester United Foundation use football to engage and inspire young people to build a better life for themselves and unite the communities in which they live. Dedicated staff deliver educational and community outreach programmes to help young people make positive choices in their lives.

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All-in-One Web3 Gaming Ecosystem Blockus Raises $4M Pre-Seed After Completing a16z Incubator Program

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The announcement comes during the Game Developers Conference week, where the company will host a special side event

Blockus, an emerging, innovative force at the intersection of blockchain technology and gaming, today announced a significant milestone, securing $4M in pre-seed funding. This successful raise follows Blockus’s participation in the prestigious a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, which not only provided access to mentors and advisors but also allowed the startup to connect with potential investors.

The pre-seed round was led by Maple VC and included Altos Ventures as well as known angel investors such as Zhuoxun Yin from Magic Eden, Michael Ma from CreatorDAO, and Bryan Pelligrino from LayerZero.

Blockus is dedicated to transforming the gaming experience by enabling studios to onboard their players and build on-chain gaming features with ease. The company has already gained traction in the market, with over 30 partners already signed, including Ambrus Studio, the team behind E4C: Final Salvation. The funding will allow Blockus to accelerate its growth, expand its team, strengthen sales operations, and invest heavily in product development.

“This pre-seed raise marks a pivotal moment in our journey,” said Jess Zhang, Co-founder & CEO at Blockus. “The trust our investors, like Maple VC, have placed in us is both humbling and inspiring. We’re ready to unlock the next level of innovation in the gaming industry, and we’re excited to bring our blockchain solutions to even more studios and developers.”

With a rapidly expanding market – approximately 62% of all dApp activity comes from gaming projects, and Web3 gaming is expected to reach $600B by 2030 – Blockus is in a prime position to capitalize on this growth.

“We’re thrilled to witness Blockus’s latest achievement,” said Johnson Yeh, Founder & CEO at Ambrus Studio. “As innovators in the gaming space, we’re proud to partner with a company that’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. The potential for Web3 in gaming is immense, and we’re confident that Blockus will play a major role in shaping its future.”

The announcement is made in the lead-up week to Game Developers Conference (GDC) taking place in San Francisco. There, the company will host a dedicated event on March 21 at 7 p.m. at the iconic SPIN bar to engage with the Web3 gaming community, and current and potential partners.

“Blockus has the potential to be the catalyst for a new era of gaming, built on the principles of decentralization and player ownership,” said Andre Charoo, General Partner at Maple VC. “The founders’ deep understanding of both gaming and Web3 technologies, combined with their track record, makes them an exceptionally compelling team to back. We believe Blockus is poised to lead the way in the Web3 gaming revolution.”

To celebrate its funding milestone, Blockus is extending a special offer of $20,000 in credits to potential clients for the two weeks following the announcement period. This offer presents a unique opportunity for game developers interested in exploring how Blockus can elevate their game experiences.

About Blockus

Blockus is a complete Web3 gaming economy ecosystem. Beautifully built, fully compliant, and seamlessly integrated into games, the company’s mission is to create a future where players have true ownership of their in-game assets and where gaming experiences are more immersive, engaging, and rewarding.

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Cosmology Raises $5M to Simplify Web3 Application Development

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Cosmology

The “Adobe for Web3” makes building dApps accessible to a wide range of developers, not just those who have expertise with the entire blockchain stack

Cosmology, the tech suite that enables developers to build Web3 apps in the Cosmos ecosystem, has closed its $5M seed round, co-led by Galileo and Lemniscap with participation from Dispersion, Hashkey, Tuesday Capital, the Osmosis Foundation, Chorus One, Informal Systems, and angels including Kevin Lin, Zaki Manian, Leland Lee, and Ethan Beard. As an official part of the Interchain Stack, Cosmology empowers over 2,000 developers to build applications like dYdX, Osmosis, and Celestia. This funding allows Cosmology to support the growth of the interchain, and provide tools that make app development accessible without requiring deep technical blockchain knowledge.

“Having spent nearly three decades at the intersection of design and technology, I see the potential of Web3 and the need to lower the barriers to development,” said Dan Lynch, Founder of Cosmology. “Our mission is to empower a broad range of developers, driving innovation and the shift from Web2 to Web3. We achieve this by enabling builders to swiftly turn their ideas into launched applications, focusing on big-picture concepts rather than the low-level technical details of blockchain.”

Cosmology’s tools make the development of Web3 applications dramatically simpler for developers throughout the interchain and have been downloaded over 5 million times. They’ve created tools like Telescope, which generates easy-to-use TypeScript libraries for developers to access the functionality of Cosmos blockchains, and Cosmos Kit, a universal wallet adapter for quickly making apps that easily interact with Cosmos blockchains and wallets.

“Dan’s work building developer tooling has led to huge growth in the number of applications being built in Cosmos,” said Sunny Aggarwal, Founder of Osmosis. “Cosmology is making app development on the 100+ blockchains in the ecosystem a streamlined, elegant process.”

Initially focused on front-end tools, Cosmology is now broadening its scope of services to offer a comprehensive full-stack environment for developers. The team now includes experts in key blockchain technologies like Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, and IBC Protocol, enhancing its suite’s capabilities across the board. This expansion gives Cosmology extra bandwidth to support developers from design to deployment, covering everything from user interface design all the way to backend blockchain and smart contract tooling.

“Cosmology is the bedrock underlying everything being built right now in the Cosmos and Celestia ecosystems,” said David Feiock, Managing Partner at Galileo. “As an integral part of building application-specific blockchains, Cosmology tools like Telescope materially reduce the complexities for developers allowing for much quicker innovation and iteration cycles, which will be an essential component of this next phase of growth in crypto.”

Commenting on the announcement, Roderik van der Graaf, Founder of Lemniscap, said: “To date, the perceived complexity of Web3 has kept many Web2 developers from exploring novel use cases that would enhance their product offerings. Cosmology is playing a pivotal role in enabling developers to incorporate Web3 elements in their applications, while circumventing the steep Web3 learning curve. We’re delighted to have co-led this funding round and look forward to supporting Dan and the team in executing a strong growth strategy in 2024 and beyond.”

“Dan’s experience building and exiting low-code platforms like Brandcast is invaluable in the Web3 space, where building applications can prove daunting,” said Pat Gallagher, Managing Partner at Tuesday Capital. “Cosmology is democratizing the digital landscape for businesses and developers alike with an Adobe-style suite of products that lower the barrier to entry, so decentralized application development doesn’t require the full-stack expertise that very few software engineers possess.”

“In the early days of the internet, the concept of every business having its own website once seemed like a pipe dream. Today, we’re at a similar point in time before the brink of a revolution with the Internet of Blockchains. Much like low and no-code platforms transformed Web2, making digital participation accessible to all businesses, I see a future where Web3 is equally open and user-friendly,” said Dan Lynch.

As Cosmos becomes an increasingly interwoven mesh of blockchains, Cosmology is at the forefront of enabling developers to build interchain-native applications. This raise helps the team further build out the essential tooling that’s making Cosmos one of the most attractive places to build in Web3 today.

About Cosmology

Cosmology is creating the Adobe of Web3 – a suite of products that work interdependently to catalyze creativity for builders.

Cosmology is building a unified developer experience for cross chain dApps, streamlining everything from low-level encoding and signing to user interfaces and wallet adapters. Our tools are becoming the standard in the interchain, where our community has now grown to 100+ chains and countless smart contract projects across the Cosmos ecosystem.

Hundreds of developers leverage Cosmology’s software to build DEXes, wallets, governance tooling, NFT platforms, lending, leverage, and liquid staking protocols. These include Osmosis, dYdX, Celestia, Cosmostation, Stride, Juno, DaoDao, Stargaze, Mars Protocol, Leap Wallet, AstroTech, Persistence, Quicksilver and more.

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Seattle based Enzzo Announces $3M in Seed Funding to Accelerate Hardware Product Development

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Enzzo supercharges the product definition and requirements process for companies creating hardware. The $3 million seed investment was led by Unlock Venture Partners with participation from PSL Ventures and the Mayfield/Pioneer Square Labs AIStudio Fund.

Enzzo, a company reimagining how hardware products are created by leveraging generative AI, announced today that it raised a $3 million seed investment led by Unlock Venture Partners with participation from PSL Ventures and the newly created Mayfield/Pioneer Square Labs AIStudio Fund. With this round of funding, the company will be expanding the team refining and building its platform.

“I know what it takes to define and ship great products,” said Andy Liu, Managing Director of Unlock Venture Partners, and former VP at VIZIO. “Enzzo is reimagining the process to amplify the abilities of product companies and manufacturers to take an idea, understand the requirements and cost, and get it to market faster with higher quality than ever before. It is a real game-changer for all hardware-related companies.”

Defining new products is challenging enough for software, but hardware’s unique variables and regulatory requirements add complexity. Companies and teams creating hardware are interested in moving faster from a vision to an in-market product but must start by defining the product and developing requirements, which typically take weeks to months. The definition phase is critical, as any hardware changes become increasingly expensive as development progresses, underscoring the critical need for comprehensive requirements and risk assessment from the outset.

To address these problems, Enzzo empowers teams to define innovative products and their requirements faster and more efficiently than is possible today – from weeks or months to days – saving time and expense. Enzzo runs in modern web browsers and leverages the power of foundation models along with company-provided data to prompt, synthesize user inputs, and then generate key outputs. The service features product management expertise accessible via a chat interface, a collaborative workspace for team members and partners to work on requirements, and document generation capability to accelerate the definition of new products.

“Enzzo represents what we believe is the new way that product teams will work by leveraging gains from AI in combination with human creativity to define and create hardware products faster,” said Ford Davidson, co-founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to have awesome investors helping us to grow the company and catalyze the next wave of hardware product innovations.”

Enzzo is a spinout of Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. “I have known Enzzo CEO Ford Davidson for over 20 years and we worked closely together building Dashwire into a successful acquisition by HTC in 2011,” said Geoff Entress, Managing Director. “Ford’s incredible background helping create new category devices and services at Microsoft, HTC, Amazon and, most recently, Meta make him the perfect leader to build Enzzo into a massive player in the hardware space.”

About Enzzo
Enzzo, Inc. is a Seattle, Washington-based company founded in 2023 by product innovators who have worked on award-winning products at startups and tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Samsung, HTC, and Roku.

About Unlock

Unlock Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm run by founders and operators that invest in world-changing technology companies based in Seattle and Los Angeles.

About PSL Ventures
PSL Ventures is a venture capital fund located in Seattle, WA. The fund is affiliated with Seattle-based startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. The organization partners with exceptional founders at the earliest stages to help build and invest in market-defining technology companies, primarily based in the Pacific Northwest.

About Pioneer Square Labs (PSL)
Pioneer Square Labs is a Seattle-based startup studio that creates and launches technology startups.

About AIStudio Fund
AIStudio Fund is an investment vehicle backed by Mayfield to invest in AI spinouts of Pioneer Square Labs.

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