MCLEAN, Va., July 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Iridium Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: IRDM), a leading provider of global voice, data, and positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) satellite services, announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Aireon LLC, operator of the world’s only space-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) air traffic surveillance system. 

Iridium has completed its acquisition of Aireon, a key step in its strategy to lead the future of aviation safety.

“Iridium and Aireon are fully aligned in our mission to advance the future of aviation safety. What began as a bold vision more than a decade ago has become a foundational capability for global air traffic management, delivering real-time surveillance and operational intelligence on a truly global scale,” said Iridium CEO, Matt Desch. “Together, we will continue investing in the technologies and innovations that we believe will make aviation safer, more efficient, and more resilient for decades to come.”

The completion of the acquisition expands Iridium’s role in the aviation ecosystem by combining Aireon’s space-based air traffic surveillance and aviation intelligence services with Iridium’s global satellite communications network and resilient PNT capabilities. Together, these assets create a comprehensive platform for delivering real-time visibility, trusted connectivity and actionable operational data to aviation stakeholders worldwide. As airspace grows more complex and increasingly dependent on resilient infrastructure, Iridium is positioned to provide the critical services that help improve safety, efficiency and operational decision-making on a global scale.

As part of Iridium, Aireon will continue operating as a wholly owned subsidiary focused on delivering industry-leading air traffic surveillance and aviation data services. Don Thoma will continue to serve as Aireon’s Chief Executive Officer and will report to Iridium’s Chief Executive Officer Matt Desch, ensuring both leadership continuity and close alignment with Iridium’s broader strategy. 

For more information about Iridium, visit: www.iridium.com 

For more information about Aireon, visit: www.aireon.com 

About Iridium Communications Inc.
Iridium Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: IRDM) operates the world’s only truly global mobile satellite network. It serves as a platform for innovation, enabling voice, data, and messaging, positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), and aircraft surveillance services anywhere on Earth. Through its satellite constellation and integrated capabilities like Aireon, the world’s only space-based air traffic surveillance system, Iridium delivers services that support safety-focused operations across aviation, maritime, government, industrial, and consumer markets. The company is a leader in satellite Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity and is advancing direct-to-device (D2D) communications based on open standards to expand access to satellite services.

Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Iridium innovates through an ecosystem of more than 500 technology and distribution partners, serving millions of customers worldwide. For more information visit www.iridium.com.

Forward-Looking Statements Disclosure
Statements in this press release that are not purely historical facts may constitute forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The Company has based these statements on its current expectations and the information currently available to it. Forward-looking statements in this press release include statements regarding the Company’s strategy to provide the foundational architecture for global aviation safety, bringing space-based surveillance, safety communications, PNT, and operational data together on a single network; continued investment in the technologies and innovations that the Company believes will make aviation safer, more efficient, and more resilient for decades to come; the future operations and management of Aireon; expected impacts of the acquisition of Aireon on the Company, and the timing thereof. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the words “anticipates,” “may,” “can,” “believes,” “expects,” “projects,” “intends,” “likely,” “will,” “to be” and other expressions that are predictions or indicate future events, trends or prospects. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Iridium to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the Company’s ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the Aireon acquisition, including expected synergies, on the expected timeline or at all, the risks that the integration of Aireon’s business may be more difficult, time-consuming, or costly than expected, the Company’s ability to maintain the health, capacity and content of its satellite constellation, as well as general industry and economic conditions, and competitive, legal, governmental and technological factors. Other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements include those factors listed under the caption “Risk Factors” in the Company’s Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on February 12, 2026, as well as other filings Iridium makes with the SEC from time to time. There is no assurance that Iridium’s expectations will be realized. If one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if Iridium’s underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those expected, estimated or projected. Iridium’s forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release, and Iridium undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

Initial results lay the groundwork for key objective of the United States Genesis Mission

Quantum-centric supercomputing algorithm takes aim at tritium extraction – a bottleneck to abundant energy and a long-standing challenge for classical computers working alone

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y., July 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — A team of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Cleveland Clinic, and IBM (NYSE: IBM), have calculated nine molecular configurations of a promising material to produce fuel for fusion energy – the first-known instance of such computations on quantum computers.

Neutrons from fusion plasma strike a molten salt blanket to produce tritium — this material is now being modeled with quantum computers. (Credit: IBM)

Such calculations, demonstrated in a new paper published on arXiv, are computationally challenging for classical computers to scale when working alone. They are a fundamental step towards optimizing the production and extraction of tritium – an extremely rare material in nature that is necessary to produce fusion energy with most of the proposed machines. Ensuring adequate supplies of tritium has long been a barrier to realizing the promise of clean and abundant energy from fusion power plants, and solving this issue is a key objective of the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission.

Quantum computers are well-suited to compute the atomic-level chemistry of a liquid salt that contains fluorine, lithium, and beryllium (FLiBe), one of the leading candidate materials for extracting tritium fuel in fusion reactors. To compute different configurations of clusters of FLiBe, the team used the same quantum-centric supercomputing techniques now being applied to 12,635-atom protein simulations with Cleveland Clinic. These methods can calculate the quantum behavior of electrons in complex materials, complementing and enhancing the capabilities of classical supercomputers and algorithms.

“In order to demonstrate the capabilities catalyzed by the Genesis Mission, we have built a team of leading experts across seven DOE national labs, four universities, three industry partners, and Cleveland Clinic to pursue a multi-pronged discovery cycle aimed at optimizing tritium production in molten salt fusion blanket materials,” said Tom Beck, Section Head for Science Engagement in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at ORNL. “Quantum computers, such as those built by IBM and enhanced by AI and exascale computing, are key tools that accelerate the discovery and design cycles needed to produce sufficient tritium to fuel fusion reactors.”

“This work builds on our advances in simulating complex biological systems at scale, including proteins spanning 12,635 atoms and extends those techniques into materials science to explore fusion-relevant systems with greater accuracy and efficiency,” said corresponding author Kenneth Merz, PhD, staff scientist at Cleveland Clinic. “At Cleveland Clinic, we are focused on applying advanced technologies to deepen scientific understanding and accelerate discovery. This collaboration reflects the growing importance of quantum computing, AI, and high-performance computing as tools for scientific inquiry. By bringing these technologies together, researchers can provide solutions to challenging real-world problems with greater speed and precision.”

“Bringing quantum, AI, and classical computing together is essential to tackling our society’s most fundamental scientific challenges – unlocking capabilities which none of these paradigms can access alone,” said Jerry Chow, CTO of Quantum-Centric Supercomputing at IBM. “These results add to mounting evidence that quantum-centric supercomputing is now a practical scientific tool for problems that have long challenged chemists, engineers, and materials scientists. As quantum computers scale, the path ahead is promising.”

The Tritium Challenge at the Heart of Fusion Energy

The exploration aligns with the Genesis Mission’s broader goal to unify high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence, and quantum computing with the country’s major scientific instruments across the DOE’s 17 national laboratories to accelerate scientific discovery. As one of the mission’s industry collaborators, IBM is working with its partners to explore how quantum-centric supercomputing – which brings together CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs to solve problems they cannot tackle alone – could help to address critical national challenges, including precisely modeling complex material interactions to help unlock a fuel supply for widespread, fully working fusion power plants.

Optimizing the best recipe for FLiBe – whose composition is dynamically changing under intense neutron radiation, extreme heat, and magnetic fields – is one of the hardest science and engineering challenges today. It requires extensive study of its quantum mechanical properties including energetics, stability, and interaction with tritium to understand how it will perform multiple functions, including that of tritium breeding material at very hot temperatures. Today, such research is only possible through difficult and expensive experimentation, or through classical computing approximation methods that can lack accuracy.

To compute energies of different FLiBe conformations with and without tritium, the team used quantum-centric supercomputing to enable quantum and classical computers to work together – in which the parts of a problem that can be broken down into quantum circuits are solved on a quantum computer. This allowed the team to more precisely determine the electronic structure of the material and how its atoms behave, particularly how strongly they bind tritium at a fundamental molecular level. In turn, the scientists could identify the range of configurations the atoms moved through and extract properties – such as how strongly and through which mechanism each configuration binds tritium – that would otherwise remain hidden.

The Road Ahead

The collaboration is ongoing, aiming to reduce the time it takes for data to transfer between quantum and classical resources and to scale the size of molecular interactions simulated. Eventually, the team hopes the fusion energy ecosystem will be able to use this workflow directly to design and verify their own materials.

This work adds to a growing body of 2026 milestones demonstrating IBM quantum computers as useful scientific tools – including simulating real magnetic materials, creating a never-before-seen half-Möbius molecule, and modeling proteins relevant to biological research that span up to 12,635 atoms.

For more about this research, please read the blog: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/molten-salts-fusion-quantum

About IBM

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

For more information, visit https://research.ibm.com.

Media Contacts:

Danielle Cerasani Estevez
IBM Communications
dcerasani@ibm.com

Brittany Forgione
IBM Communications
Brittany.Forgione@ibm.com

IBM Corporation logo.

ZURICH, July 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tyron Birkmeir, Founder and Chairman of Lurra Capital, an invitation-only investment firm, announced that the firm has secured a $7 million allocation to back LurraPay through one of its affiliates. LurraPay is a stablecoin banking platform offering EUR, USD and GBP virtual accounts powered by USDC and EURC, with on-ramp and off-ramp rails powered by MoonPay. LurraPay’s standalone hardware wallet is scheduled to ship in September 2026.

LurraPay provides individuals and businesses a single account to move between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies. MoonPay, which powers the platform’s rails, serves more than 35 million verified accounts across 180 countries.

“We built the wallet around two Nordic Semiconductor chips. The nRF54L15 secure core stores the private keys and signs every transaction. Keys are generated and sealed inside that chip, and they never leave it. It uses Arm TrustZone isolation and is designed to meet PSA Certified Level 3. The second chip, an nRF7002, handles Wi-Fi, which is why there is no USB cable, no companion app, and no paired laptop. The device is designed and assembled in the European Union from non-Chinese components, and it supports more than 500 coins across more than 50 chains,” said Edward Nastase, CTO of LurraPay. Pre-order information is available at lurrapay.com/wallet

“Stablecoin infrastructure is becoming the default settlement layer for cross-border wealth management. LurraPay gives institutional and high-net-worth clients licensed fiat-to-stablecoin access alongside hardware-native self-custody that does not require trusting a third party with private keys. That security combination does not exist as single product before today which is why we are so excited. Edward is an incredible engineer and we are privileged to have this opportunity to partner” said Tyron Birkmeir

Some of Tyron Birkmeir’s publicly reported high profile investments through Lurra Capital include SpaceX, Redwood Materials, and Dataminr.

About Lurra Capital
Founded by Tyron Birkmeir, Lurra Capital is an invitation-only global investment firm combining specialist expertise, innovative and alternative investment solutions to ultra-high net worth investors and family offices. Lurra’s strategy encompasses exclusive, highly sought-after investments in the core areas of real estate, private equity and technology. More information is available at lurracapital.com and Linkedin.

About LurraPay
LurraPay is a multi-currency stablecoin banking platform offering EUR, USD, and GBP virtual accounts with on-ramp, off-ramp, and swap, powered by licensed financial partners. LurraPay Inc. has developed a self-contained hardware wallet, designed and manufactured in the European Union, scheduled to ship in September 2026. More information available on lurrapay.com and Linkedin.