London and Johannesburg, May 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RedCloud Holdings plc (Nasdaq: RCT) (‘RedCloud’ or ‘the Company’), the company building intelligent infrastructure for global trade, and ACA Capital, a diversified supply chain group operating across South Africa and broader African markets, today announced their intent to form a joint venture (‘JV’) to deploy RedAI infrastructure and the RAID (Realtime AI for Distribution) engine across ACA Capital’s distribution ecosystem transacting around $300m in FMCG goods 1 per year. The announcement follows the appointment last week of Vikram Sharma as Chief Revenue Officer, Infrastructure, whose mandate is to scale the Company’s capital-light JV model into high-growth FMCG corridors across new markets.

Under the proposed JV, ACA Capital and RedCloud will co-deploy RedAI infrastructure — including the RAID engine trained on $6.9 billion 2 in proprietary global FMCG transactional data — across ACA Capital’s network of brands, suppliers, retailers and communities. The JV is to be structured on RedCloud’s established capital-light model, generating both a licence fee and shared transaction-based revenue. Integration is expected to be delivered via Representational State Transfer (‘REST’) Application Interfaces (‘APIs’) and Extract, Transform and Load (‘ETL’) pipelines that ingest and normalise trading data from the Enterprise Resource Planning (‘ERP’) systems operating across the ACA Capital ecosystem.

The JV is designed to deploy RedCloud’s three RedAI Specialist Agents — the Inventory Agent, Sales Agent and Market Planning Agent, each currently in development — directly across ACA Capital’s distribution and retail networks. The agents are being developed on Anthropic’s Claude models (Haiku, Sonnet and Opus) and surface recommendations within existing native and web applications via MCP-based integrations, where possible, requiring no workflow disruption for end users. Each agent is designed to partially automate high-frequency, high-value FMCG supply chain decisions, delivering semi-autonomous workflows and human-in-the-loop decision making at scale across the ACA Capital ecosystem. Agent telemetry and decision-quality metrics will be tracked through OpenTelemetry observability pipelines, enabling continuous performance monitoring and model improvement in production.

The southern African FMCG market represents a significant and underserved opportunity for data-driven distribution intelligence. South Africa’s FMCG market alone is estimated to be $221 billion 3 in in 2025, growing at approximately 7% year-on-year, with the informal trade channel — more than 140,000 traditional trade outlets 4 — consistently outpacing modern trade growth in South Africa. ACA Capital’s position spanning FMCG distribution, hardware and building materials, digital retail tools, and supply chain systems gives the JV immediate breadth of data and distribution reach across the region.

This JV represents the next step in RedCloud’s accelerating deployment momentum. In March 2026, RAID outperformed industry benchmarks for accuracy across 3.7 million live FMCG transactions in a developmental R&D validation. In April 2026, RedCloud entered the deployment phase of RAID with a leading distribution network in Türkiye and signed a five-year licensing agreement of up to $30 million to deploy RedAI and RAID across Saudi Arabia’s $68 billion FMCG market 5 . The three RedAI Specialist Agents were announced in April 2026, with rollout expected in H2 2026. On May 6, 2026, RedCloud appointed Vikram Sharma as CRO, Infrastructure, to accelerate the Company’s capital-light JV pipeline across high-growth global markets. The ACA Capital JV extends that momentum into South Africa and adjacent African markets.

Ahmed Carrim, CEO of ACA Capital, said, “We have built a diversified, technology-forward distribution group across South Africa and broader African markets. Partnering with RedCloud through this JV is a step-change in our ecosystem’s ability to make data-driven decisions at scale. RedAI and its RAID engine — trained on billions of dollars of real FMCG transaction data — is expected to give our teams predictive intelligence that is unlikely to have been available to regional distributors in South Africa before. Together, we will optimise inventory flows, reduce inefficiencies and waste, while growing market share and revenues. We are proud to be part of RedCloud’s expanding global infrastructure.”

Justin Floyd, CEO and Co-Founder of RedCloud, said, “This expected JV with ACA Capital is exactly the type of capital-light, ecosystem-led expansion our model is designed for — an established operator with deep market reach and the ambition to transform their supply chain through AI. RAID has been R&D validated on 3.7 million live transactions and our RedAI Specialist Agents are in development. We now have a CRO in Vikram Sharma, whose entire focus is building the JV pipeline across new markets, and ACA Capital is a powerful first deployment in southern Africa. The $221 billion South African FMCG market alone is large, fragmented, and data-poor at the distribution layer — precisely the conditions where RAID can deliver the greatest impact.”

About ACA Capital

ACA Capital is a diversified distribution and procurement group with deep operational roots across South Africa’s formal and informal markets, established cross-border trade routes across other African markets, and material scale across both FMCG and hardware categories underpinned by long-standing supplier relationships. The group connects brands, suppliers, retailers and communities through integrated supply chain systems, digital tools for retailers, and expanded market access, with a focus on reducing inefficiencies and driving sustainable growth across African trade.

About RedCloud Holdings plc

RedCloud’s mission is to build the intelligence infrastructure of global trade, through generation and aggregation of proprietary trading and market data from across the FMCG industry through its RedAI infrastructure and associated products (‘RedAI’). RedCloud provides market intelligence based on proprietary trading data across categories in each of its markets. The Company also delivers a trading infrastructure and related products for use by its customers, to enable intelligent digital exchange of everyday consumer supplies of FMCG products across business supply chains, supported by a payments and lending ecosystem intended to streamline trade. RedCloud believes its platform and associated products and services solve a decades-old problem of how to digitize trade at scale to generate data and intelligence to enable brands, distributors and retailers to maximize business performance across categories in high growth consumer markets.

RedCloud is a British company registered in London, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Justin Floyd and Soumaya Hamzaoui. For more information about RedCloud and its RedAI platform, please visit www.redcloudtechnology.com and connect on LinkedIn.

Footnotes:

1 $300m ACA Capital’s estimated value of FMCG goods transacted per annum – ACA Capital company data.

2 $6.9Bn value of FMCG goods traded across the RedAI infrastructure from January 2023 to December 2025.

3 $221Bn estimated South African FMCG market 2025 – Cognitive Market Research.

4 140,000+ traditional trade outlets in South Africa – NielsenIQ, State of the Retail Nation, 2025 full year analysis, March 2026.

5 $68Bn estimated Saudi Arabian FMCG market 2025 – Cognitive Market Research.

Forward-Looking Statements

The information in this press release may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. When used in this press release, words such as “expect,” “project,” “estimate,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” “seek,” “forecast,” “target,” “predict,” “may,” “should,” “would,” “could,” and “will,” the negative of these terms and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain such identifying words. Forward-looking statements are based on management’s current expectations and assumptions, and are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict, including, but not limited to, the successful execution of the joint venture with ACA Capital and the deployment of the RedAI platform across southern African markets, the ability to successfully develop and deploy RAID and the three RedAI Specialist Agents on Anthropic’s Claude models enabling real-time, context-aware decision support for end-users, the continued availability and performance of Anthropic’s Claude model family for agent development and deployment, the ability to deploy RAID and RedAI across the ACA Capital ecosystem at scale, the ability to generate revenues from FMCG enterprise subscriptions and transaction-linked fees from the JV, the potential expansion of the JV into additional African markets, the quality and continuity of data contributed by ACA Capital for RedAI model training, the ability to scale RedCloud’s capital-light joint venture model into additional markets, and the Company’s ability to achieve its stated 2026 revenue target. As a result, actual results could differ materially from those indicated in these forward-looking statements. When considering these forward-looking statements, you should keep in mind the risk factors and other cautionary statements described in “Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements,” “Item 3. Key Information – D. Risk Factors” and “Item 5. Operating and Financial Review and Prospects” in RedCloud’s Annual Report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2024, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on May 16, 2025, as well as other documents filed by the Company with the SEC. RedCloud undertakes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after this press release. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, the Company’s website or any other website or any social media is expressly not incorporated by reference into and is not a part of this press release.

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