Top destinations for corporate team-building trips

 

DUBLIN, Aug 28 (Bernama-GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As the "back-to-work" season approaches, companies are replacing virtual meetings with face-to-face retreats to address remote work fatigue and strengthen organizational culture.

To identify where teams can genuinely build connections, Holafly has launched the Global Team-Building Index, ranking destinations based on group activity infrastructure, accessibility, overall experience, and value.

The results identify Lisbon, Portugal as the world's leading destination, driven by its coastal activities, flight connectivity, and competitive costs.

The rise of the active corporate retreat
As hybrid and remote work become permanent, business travel is shifting toward experiential connections. Organizations are prioritizing places where employees can bond outdoors, whether that means sailing together or embarking on scavenger hunts.

The Iberian Peninsula takes the crown
Lisbon secured the number one spot: the airport sits close to the city center, while the river and coast provide a spectacular playground for sailing regattas and surfing challenges. Barcelona follows in second place with large hotel room blocks alongside high-end cultural experiences.

Eastern and Central Europe are budget-friendly champions
To maximize budget efficiency without sacrificing quality, Central Europe offers compelling alternatives. Prague and Budapest rank high, with costs for dining, accommodations, and venue up to 30% lower than Western Europe. Both offer memorable group activities like medieval castle banquets and old-town scavenger hunts.

Top 10 global destinations for team-building in 2026
1 - Lisbon, Portugal
2 - Barcelona, Spain
3 - Prague, Czech Republic
4 - Mallorca, Spain
5 - Budapest, Hungary
6 - Antalya, Turkey
7 - Athens, Greece
8 - Milan, Italy
9 - Chamonix, France
10 - Berlin, Germany

Where should Californians go for a team-building retreat?
The California Team-Building Index evaluated destinations within a 4-hour flight radius. Cabo San Lucas (Mexico) ranked first, offering direct flights, luxury resorts, and premium activities. It is followed by Denver (Colorado), which serves as an oasis for wellness retreats.

Top 10 Team-Building Destinations for Californians
1 - Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
2 - Denver, United States
3 - Mexico City, Mexico
4 - Portland, United States
5 - Vancouver, Canada
6 - Scottsdale, United States
7 - Austin, United States
8 - Jackson Hole, United States
9 - Guanajuato, Mexico
10 - Kauai, United States

Where should European companies go for their next offsite?
For British companies, Lisbon combines sunny coasts with rapid flight access. For German teams, Prague offers rail and air accessibility with budget efficiency. Spanish enterprises find their match in Lisbon, benefiting from proximity and local value.

Top 5 team-building destinations for UK companies
1 - Lisbon, Portugal
2 - Barcelona, Spain
3 - Mallorca, Spain
4 - Chamonix, France
5 - Prague, Czech Republic

Top 5 team-building destinations for German companies
1 - Prague, Czech Republic
2 - Lisbon, Portugal
3 - Barcelona, Spain
4 - Mallorca, Spain
5 - Budapest, Hungary

Top 5 team-building destinations for Spanish companies
1 - Lisbon, Portugal
2 - Prague, Czech Republic
3 - Budapest, Hungary
4 - Milan, Italy
5 - Antalya, Turkey

Media contact: press@holafly.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a87330a4-e6c3-4611-a953-322300a417ba 

SOURCE: Holafly

Sapient Intelligence Launches PRAXIST (Beta) to Accelerate a New Era of Autonomous AI-led Research and Development

• 49 gold-medal outcomes across 75 machine learning competitions from MLE-Bench achieving approximately US$3,000, versus 34 for Claude Code at US$38,000
• 
  
• Rocket-landing accuracy reached 100% within 12 hours, demonstrating a proof-of-concept capability at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3

SINGAPORE, Aug 28 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- Singapore-headquartered artificial general intelligence research company Sapient Intelligence today announced the launch of PRAXIST (Beta), an autonomous AI research and development (R&D) system that takes on complex technical problems and independently tests and validates potential solutions.

While AI has rapidly accelerated productivity in content generation and other well-defined workflows, R&D remains inherently difficult to automate and scale. Breakthroughs require testing multiple hypotheses, learning from successes and failures, and continuously determining which paths to pursue. Organizations must address this all while balancing specialist expertise, time, cost, and infrastructure.

A capacity multiplier

PRAXIST addresses this challenge as an R&D capacity multiplier. Rather than executing a predefined path, it independently explores which technical approach can best achieve a measurable objective. Users define the goal, parameters, and budget; PRAXIST then autonomously experiments and evaluates the strongest solution.

The approach has demonstrated promising results in controlled internal evaluations. On 75 challenging Kaggle competitions from MLE-Bench, a benchmark designed to test how well AI systems tackle complex, real-world machine learning problems across, PRAXIST achieved the highest-level result in 49 competitions at an approximate recorded model cost of US$3,000, compared with 34 highest-level results for Claude Code at approximately US$38,000 under the same evaluation conditions.

“Unlike general coding agents, which are built primarily to execute a specific task, PRAXIST is designed for long-horizon R&D, where the problem-solving approach itself may need to be discovered and adapted,” says William Chen, Co-Founder at Sapient Intelligence. “A conventional research team is ultimately constrained by the number of experiments its researchers can realistically run and evaluate. PRAXIST is designed to provide organizations with the ability to augment their existing teams with additional research capacity, enabling them to explore problems with a breadth and speed that would otherwise require significantly greater specialist resources.”

From autonomous research to cumulative scientific discovery

PRAXIST deploys multiple autonomous research peers to explore approaches in parallel, test hypotheses, investigate failures, and validate promising results. Unlike the tree-like search used by other similar systems, where each candidate inherits from one parent and weaker branches are pruned, PRAXIST uses a generation-layered research graph that preserves what every experiment teaches. This allows later generations to combine valuable mechanisms, evidence, and constraints across different lineages, including failed attempts. Rather than searching for the single best branch, PRAXIST constructs stronger solutions from discoveries made across branches.

Expansion and scale at speed

For organizations with limited AI or machine learning capabilities, PRAXIST can provide an AI research layer alongside existing domain expertise; for sophisticated teams, it can augment existing capabilities and increase the scale and breadth of R&D. A traditional robotics company, for example, can define problems, objectives, and constraints from an engineering perspective while PRAXIST conducts the AI research, experimentation, and validation needed to develop solutions, effectively serving as an in-house AI research team without requiring the company to build one.

Partner engineering results further illustrate this potential. In a partner-provided rocket-landing simulation, PRAXIST improved baseline to 100% within 12 hours, demonstrating a proof-of-concept capability at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3. In an industrial robotic SLAM problem, a partner team achieved 9.37cm of accumulated error after several months of development. PRAXIST reduced the error to 5.01cm within three days.

System application

PRAXIST can operate with proprietary data in private or customer-controlled environments, giving organizations greater control over their research infrastructure and sensitive intellectual property.

Initial applications are focused on sectors with intensive R&D requirements or highly measurable or simulatable optimization problems, including AI, engineering and robotics, manufacturing, finance, and health and drug discovery. Over time, Sapient Intelligence aims to extend PRAXIST beyond traditional R&D into broader business optimization, from inventory and sales to logistics and shipping.

“AI has mastered executing what we know. The next frontier is discovering what we don’t,” said Jin Li, Chief Scientist of PRAXIST. “PRAXIST is our first step toward making autonomous discovery a practical capability for organizations tackling complex problems. As we continue to develop the platform, we will look to expand beyond traditional R&D. Our ambition is to give organizations a fundamentally greater capacity to explore what is possible, enabling existing teams to pursue more experiments, approaches, and innovations while keeping human expertise and judgment at the center.”

About Sapient Intelligence

Founded and headquartered in Singapore, Sapient Intelligence is developing a new generation of AI systems that move beyond answering questions and executing predefined tasks to autonomously discover, reason, and optimize across complex problems without predefined solutions. By combining autonomous research systems with novel foundation-model architectures, Sapient Intelligence advances autonomous discovery through deeper reasoning, self-evolving capabilities, greater adaptability, and enhanced interpretability.

At the center of this vision is PRAXIST, the company’s flagship autoresearch system enabling breakthroughs in real-world R&D and business challenges. Sapient is also the creator of the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), a novel, brain-inspired foundation model architecture designed to enable deep reasoning with substantially greater training efficiency.

With a global team of more than 50 researchers and engineers operating across Singapore, Palo Alto, and Beijing, Sapient brings together experience from leading AI organizations and research institutions. The company connects foundational AI research with demanding applications in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics, developing original AI systems for enterprises, researchers, and institutions worldwide.

Learn more about PRAXIST here.

View source version on businesswire.com:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260827080331/en/

Contact

The Hoffman Agency on behalf of Sapient Intelligence
Sapient@hoffman.com

Source : Sapient Intelligence

--BERNAMA

ARC’TERYX INTRODUCES SYSTEM 0 CIRCULAR DESIGN FRAMEWORK

Arc’teryx athlete, Craig Murray, wearing the Sperro SV, a multisport mountain-grade hardshell built with circular design principles, available September 4, 2026.

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 27 (Bernama) -- Arc’teryx Equipment, a global designer of technical high-performance apparel and equipment, has introduced System 0, a new framework designed to embed circularity across the product lifecycle, from design and manufacturing through use, repair and end-of-life regeneration.

The first product under the framework is the Sperro SV jacket, a mountain-grade hardshell designed for durability, repairability and disassembly for recycling at end of life. The jacket uses GORE-TEX Pro fabric with an ePE membrane, while its nylon face fabric and backer were separately designed for recyclability in partnership with Aquafil, the manufacturer of ECONYL regenerated nylon.

Available globally from Sept 4 through Arc’teryx stores and its website, the Sperro SV is positioned as the brand’s most advanced hardshell jacket and is intended to demonstrate that circular design can be integrated into technical apparel without compromising performance.

“System 0 represents a fundamental shift in how we build and scale our business with circularity front of mind. For decades, Arc’teryx has built gear that is meant to be repaired, not replaced. This is the next step forward,” said Arc’teryx Chief Executive Officer, Stuart Haselden in a statement.

The Sperro SV is the first product certified under TESTEX Circularity, a standard Arc’teryx said it co-developed to address gaps in existing circular product standards. The certification evaluates the jacket’s durability, repairability and ability to undergo chemical recycling.

System 0 builds on Arc’teryx’s existing ReBIRD ecosystem of washing, repair, trade-in, resale and upcycling initiatives. The company said the new framework extends these principles across design, sourcing, manufacturing, customer experience, repair and end-of-life recovery as part of an effort to make circularity a scalable operating model.

The Sperro SV has been tested by alpine professionals, including Vancouver’s North Shore Rescue. It features reinforcement at common failure points, including an easily replaceable zipper slider, and comes with three years of unlimited out-of-warranty repairs through ReBIRD.

When the jacket is no longer repairable, its fabric can undergo chemical recycling to separate the nylon from the GORE-TEX membrane. The nylon is then returned to Aquafil to be regenerated into ECONYL yarn for new products.

-- BERNAMA

TEMENOS: SACOMBANK UPGRADES CORE BANKING PLATFORM TO HYBRID CLOUD

 

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 27 (Bernama) -- Temenos announced that SACOMBANK has successfully upgraded its Temenos Core Banking platform, moving from an on-premises deployment to a hybrid cloud environment to support greater scalability, performance and faster innovation.

Temenos in a statement said the successful go-live involved the Vietnamese commercial bank upgrading to the latest Temenos Core Banking platform, deployed on Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Power infrastructure.

“As the trusted modernisation partner for banks across APAC, Temenos is proud to support SACOMBANK’s move to hybrid cloud and selection of Temenos Payments Hub, strengthening its foundation for innovation and growth,” said Temenos Managing Director – APAC, William Dale.

Meanwhile, SACOMBANK Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Luu Danh Duc said the upgrade is an important milestone in the bank’s digital transformation journey, with a scalable, high-performing and flexible foundation enabling it to accelerate innovation, deliver new services faster and continue providing secure, seamless banking experiences for customers.

The upgraded platform supports the bank’s retail and small and medium enterprise (SME) banking operations, serving millions of customers and processing 13 million transactions daily, while helping improve scalability, resilience and operational agility.

With a modern, cloud-native core banking platform, SACOMBANK is well positioned to advance real-time banking services, data-driven innovation and next-generation digital capabilities.

The upgrade enables significant gains in performance, speed and efficiency, including a 200 per cent improvement in application performance, three-times faster deployment cycles and a 50 per cent reduction in server footprint.

The bank has also selected Temenos Payments Hub to support cross-border payments, building on its long-standing relationship with Temenos and reinforcing its strategy to progressively enhance core banking and payments capabilities on a flexible, cloud-native platform.

-- BERNAMA

Hack The Box Report Finds AI Agents Used by 68% of Top 25 Cybersecurity Teams

Three-year benchmark finds median solve times dropped by more than 12 hours, while full-board completions surged from two teams in 2024 to 15 in 2026

NEW YORK, Aug 27 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- Hack The Box (HTB), the cyber readiness platform for humans and AI, today released its 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark Research Brief. The brief includes a three-year analysis revealing that cybersecurity teams are reaching successful solutions significantly faster, completing more of the challenge set, and increasingly incorporating AI agents into their work.

The strongest evidence of AI adoption emerged among the competition’s top performers. AI agent accounts made up just 2.7% of all registered accounts, yet 17 of the top 25 teams (68%) had one. Those agents accounted for 4.2% of submitted flags and 4.6% of points awarded. The findings do not establish that AI caused teams to perform better. They do, however, show that AI is already becoming part of the toolkit used by many of the competition’s strongest teams.

Performance across the competition has also shifted substantially over the past three years. Median recorded time-to-solve dropped from 26.1 hours in 2024 to 13.8 hours in 2026, a reduction of more than 12 hours. At the same time, the number of teams completing the entire challenge board rose from two in 2024 and three in 2025 to 15 in 2026, even as the board expanded.

The findings come as AI is changing both sides of the cybersecurity equation. Recent industry disclosures, including Hugging Face’s July 2026 incident disclosure and OWASP’s Q1 2026 GenAI exploit roundup, show how AI is creating new risks while also becoming part of both the attack surface and the defensive response. For security leaders, the challenge is not simply adopting AI, but making sure practitioners have the skills and judgment to direct, test and validate its work.

“The question for security leaders is no longer whether AI will become part of cybersecurity operations. That is already happening on both sides of the equation,” said Haris Pylarinos, Founder and CEO of Hack The Box. “What matters now is whether teams have the expertise to use it safely and effectively. Our data shows that AI is appearing most often alongside some of the strongest practitioners, not instead of them. As agents become more capable, human judgment, validation and hands-on technical skill become more important, not less.”

AI is changing how top cyber teams work

The findings build on earlier HTB research examining AI and cybersecurity performance. While the earlier controlled benchmark explored what happens when practitioners work with AI, the latest data provides a view into where AI agents appear when competitors are free to choose their own approach.

Together, the findings suggest that AI is moving from experimentation to the working methods of experienced cybersecurity practitioners. At the same time, the results reinforce the importance of human expertise in directing, evaluating and validating AI-generated work.

The full 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark Research Brief is available HERE.

About Hack The Box

Hack The Box is the leading cyber readiness platform for the agentic era, battle-testing and upskilling both humans and AI agents to enhance organizational cyber resilience. Trusted by the Fortune 500, government agencies, and managed security service providers (MSSPs), the platform delivers threat-informed learning paths consisting of real-world scenarios in gamified labs and live-fire simulations that build and validate offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. With a loyal community of more than 4.3 million members and more than 800 enterprise customers, Hack The Box empowers teams and intelligent systems alike to strengthen cyber defenses and reduce breach risk effectively. Learn more at www.hackthebox.com.

View source version on businesswire.com:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260826134377/en/

Contact

Media Contacts

Hack The Box
Sofia Vourlaki
ophiv@hackthebox.com

The Nova Method
Justine Schneider
jschneider@thenovamethod.com

PRPR
Tracey Treanor
traceyt@prpr.co.uk

Source : Hack The Box

--BERNAMA

Born in Riyadh. Sold Out in Paris. stc and EWC a Winning Partnership.

 

^{Fans hold up the stc/EWC banner during the Esports World Cup 2026 grand final at the Accor Arena in Paris (Photo: AETOSWire)} 

 

• stc group was the Founding and Elite Partner of the Esports World Cup for the third consecutive year.
• EWC 2026, the largest edition of the tournament to date, brought together more than 2,000 players and 200 clubs from over 100 countries, competing across 25 tournaments and 24 game titles.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Aug 26 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- stc group, a leading digital enabler, concluded its third consecutive year as a Founding and Elite Partner of the Esports World Cup (EWC), supporting the tournament as it staged its first edition outside Saudi Arabia in Paris. The largest EWC to date brought together more than 2,000 professional players and 200 clubs from over 100 countries, competing across 25 tournaments and 24 game titles for a prize pool exceeding $75 million.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260825372468/en/ 

The move to Paris marked a new chapter for a tournament launched in Riyadh in 2024, reflecting growing international reach and the increasing profile of esports. stc’s continued partnership through that expansion reflects a broader commitment to the gaming ecosystem, supporting professional competition, amateur players, broadcast access, and the digital infrastructure behind esports events.

Throughout EWC 2026, stc maintained a prominent presence across the competition. The stc Arena hosted VALORANT, League of Legends, Counter-Strike 2, Rocket League, EA FC 26, Overwatch 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, alongside the stc Player’s Lounge and stc Contenders.

The partnership also created opportunities beyond the professional circuit. Through the Warriors Cup, more than 10,000 amateur players competed in over 200 tournaments across 16 games, giving emerging talent a pathway to participate in organized competition.

stc also extended the tournament to audiences beyond the venues through a dedicated EWC channel on stc tv. Launched on July 5, the channel delivered 10 to 12 hours of daily coverage, including live matches, highlights and analysis, and recorded more than three million plays by August 23.

Strong demand followed EWC to its conclusion in Paris. Championship Sunday was moved to Accor Arena, one of the city’s largest indoor venues, providing additional capacity for fans and a high-profile finale to the tournament’s first edition outside Saudi Arabia.

The partnership has grown alongside EWC since its inaugural edition in Riyadh. In 2024, the tournament attracted more than 500 million viewers globally, while stc supported connectivity for more than 10,000 players with 99.9% network availability. A year later, EWC welcomed more than 2,000 professional players and three million on-site visitors, as stc increased its network coverage by over 20%.

stc’s contribution to gaming has also been recognized by the Communications, Space and Technology Commission, which has named the group a Platinum Gaming Operator for ten consecutive cycles.

Three years on, the partnership has evolved alongside EWC as it has grown from its Riyadh debut to an international stage. stc continues to support growth across connectivity, broadcasting and competition, helping expand how players and audiences participate in one of the world’s fastest-growing forms of entertainment.

*Source: AETOSWire

View source version on businesswire.com:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260825372468/en/

Contact

Mohammad Khan
STC-ME@fgsglobal.com

Source : stc group

SHAPE MEMORY MEDICAL CLOSES US$10 MLN FINANCING FOR CLINICAL TRIALS

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 24 (Bernama) -- Shape Memory Medical Inc, a California-based global medical device company, has closed a US$10 million convertible note financing led by new investor August Global Partners (AGP), joined by fellow new investor Taiwania Capital. (US$1=RM4.03)

The financing provides capital to support continued clinical development of the company’s aortic portfolio, including patient follow-up and data collection in the AAA-SHAPE Pivotal Trial, and advancement of the False Lumen Treatment for Prevention of Aortic Growth Using Shape Memory Polymer (FLAGSHIP) feasibility trial.

The company said it is backed by a global syndicate of healthcare investors, including HBM Healthcare Investments (Cayman) Ltd, Earlybird Venture Capital and WexMed II LLC. The financing was also supported by HEAL Venture Lab.

“With enrolment recently completed in our AAA-SHAPE Pivotal Trial and continued progress in FLAGSHIP, we are focused on generating the clinical evidence needed to support the broader adoption of our shape memory polymer technology in aortic applications,” said Shape Memory Medical President and Chief Executive Officer, Ted Ruppel.

He said the company was pleased to welcome AGP and Taiwania Capital as investors and appreciated the continued support of its existing shareholders.

The AAA‑SHAPE Pivotal Trial is evaluating the safety and effectiveness of the IMPEDE‑FX RapidFill Device when used alongside endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) to proactively manage the abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) sac.

Shape Memory Medical in a statement said the randomised, multicentre study recently completed enrolment and will follow patients for five years.

FLAGSHIP is a first-in-human clinical study evaluating the company’s investigational False Lumen Embolisation (FLE) System for treatment of aortic dissection false lumen. The study is designed to evaluate safety and preliminary signs of efficacy and will follow patients for two years.

AGP is a Singapore-based independent fund management firm investing across healthcare and advanced manufacturing, while Taiwania Capital is a venture capital firm focused on early- to growth-stage companies.

-- BERNAMA