SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 16, 2025--
Motive, the AI platform for physical operations, today announced the appointment of Adeyemi (Ade) Ajao to the Company’s Board of Directors (the “Board”). Ajao is an AI innovator and enterprise technology leader with a track record of founding and scaling global market-shaping technology companies including Identified, Inc., an AI-powered HR platform. Today, he is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Base10 Partners, a venture firm focused on investing in transformative technology companies.
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“Ade’s deep experience as a founder, operator, and investor in AI companies will be invaluable as we expand our AI platform and scale internationally,” said Shoaib Makani, co-founder and CEO of Motive. “He brings a unique perspective on turning AI innovation into durable enterprise value and navigating new international markets. This will help us to continue to unlock the full potential of the people who run the global physical economy."
“Motive is setting the standard for AI-powered transformation in the physical economy,” said Adeyemi Ajao. “I’m excited to join the Board at this pivotal moment to help the company scale globally and empower large enterprises around the world to solve their most complex safety and operational challenges.”
Ajao is widely recognized as a visionary entrepreneur and leading investor in technology and AI-powered enterprise solutions. Prior to Base10, Ajao co-founded and led several high-impact ventures, including Tuenti Technologies, S.L.U., the “Spanish Facebook” acquired by Telefónica in 2010, and Identified, Inc., which was acquired by Workday in 2014. At Workday, Ajao served as Vice President of Technology Product Strategy and launched Workday Ventures, the company’s first fund dedicated to Applied AI for Enterprise Software.
Ajao holds an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a J.D. in Law and M.S. in Finance and Economics from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain, and holds a certificate in Machine Learning from Stanford University.
To learn more about Motive, visit gomotive.com.
About Motive
Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time, safety, operations, and finance teams can manage their workers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet-related spend in a single system. Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises such as Halliburton, KONE, Komatsu, NBC Universal, and Maersk across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, waste services, and the public sector.
Visit gomotive.com to learn more.
Adeyemi Ajao
President Donald Trump’s top Cabinet officials overseeing national security are expected back on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as questions mount over the swift escalation of U.S. military force and deadly boat strikes in international waters near Venezuela.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others are set to brief members of the House and the Senate amid congressional investigations into a military strike in September that killed two survivors of an initial attack on a boat allegedly carrying cocaine. Legal experts say it could have been a war crime, or murder. On the eve of the hearings, the U.S. military announced three more boat attacks targeting “designated terrorist organizations,” killing eight more people.
Here's the latest:
The United States gained a decent 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October as federal workers departed after cutbacks by the Trump administration, the government said Tuesday in delayed reports. And the unemployment rate rose to 4.6%, highest since 2021.
Hiring has clearly lost momentum, hobbled by uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in inflation.
American companies are mostly holding onto the employees they have. But they’re reluctant to hire new ones as they struggle to assess how to use artificial intelligence and how to adjust to Trump’s unpredictable policies, especially his double-digit taxes on imports from around the world.
▶ Read more about how the uncertainty leaves jobseekers struggling to even land interviews
The Ukrainian president says proposals being negotiated with U.S. officials for a deal to end the fighting in Russia’s nearly 4-year-old invasion of his country could be finalized within days, after which American envoys will present them to the Kremlin before possible further meetings in the U.S. next weekend.
A draft peace plan discussed with the U.S. during talks in Berlin on Monday is “not perfect” but is “very workable,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters, while cautioning that some key issues — notably what happens to Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces — remain unresolved.
But as the spotlight shifts to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin may balk at some of the proposals thrashed out by officials from Washington, Kyiv and Western Europe, including postwar security guarantees for Ukraine.
The security proposal discussed in Berlin will be based on Western help in keeping the Ukrainian army strong, an official from a NATO nation said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
“Europeans will lead a multinational and multi-domain force to strengthen those troops and to secure Ukraine from the land, sea and air, and the U.S. will lead a ceasefire monitoring and verification mechanism, with international participation,” the official said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated Tuesday that Russia wants a comprehensive peace deal, and that if Ukraine seeks “momentary, unsustainable solutions, we are unlikely to be ready to participate.”
“We want peace — we don’t want a truce that would give Ukraine a respite and prepare for the continuation of the war,” he told reporters. “We want to stop this war, achieve our goals, secure our interests, and guarantee peace in Europe for the future.”
“It seems like another example of the pay-to-play administration,” said Kedric Payne, who leads the ethics program at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington. “There is clearly a perception that in order to get favorable policies and acts from the administration, a company needs to provide a financial benefit to the president.”
Trump Media did not respond to specific questions about the arrangement. “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Crypto.com was under siege for more a year, told enforcement action was likely as part of an aggressive Biden administration push to regulate the cryptocurrency industry. Then Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and the company’s legal peril dissipated.
By August, Crypto.com announced it was plunging roughly $1 billion worth of assets into a venture with a new partner — Trump’s social media company, which had lost hundreds of millions of dollars since its 2021 launch.
Legal and ethics experts say Crypto.com’s journey from investigative target to Trump business partner provides a case study of conflicts of interest as Trump family businesses enter lucrative arrangements with federally regulated companies, some of which have benefited from action taken by his administration.
▶ Read more from the AP investigation into Trump’s relationship with Crypto.com
Hegseth, Rubio and others are set to brief members of the House and the Senate behind closed doors as the U.S. is building up its presence with warships, flying fighter jets near Venezuelan airspace and seizing an oil tanker as part of its campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from office.
Trump’s Republican administration has not sought any authorization from Congress for action against Venezuela. But lawmakers objecting to the military incursions are pushing war powers resolutions toward potential voting this week.
▶ Read more about the briefing
The Trump administration said in a court filing Monday that the president’s White House ballroom construction project must continue for unexplained national security reasons and because a preservationists’ organization that wants it stopped has no standing to sue.
The filing was in response to a lawsuit filed last Friday by the National Trust for Historic Preservation asking a federal judge to halt President Donald Trump’s project until it goes through multiple independent reviews and a public comment period and wins approval from Congress.
The administration’s 36-page filing included a declaration from Matthew C. Quinn, deputy director of the U.S. Secret Service, the agency responsible for the security of the president and other high-ranking officials, that said more work on the site of the former White House East Wing is still needed to meet the agency’s “safety and security requirements.” The filing did not explain the specific national security concerns; the administration has offered to share classified details with the judge in a private, in-person setting without the plaintiffs present.
▶ Read more about the court filing
Here’s a look at key moments in Trump fights with the media in his second term:
The 33-page lawsuit filed in Florida accuses the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump,” calling it “ a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence ” the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
It accuses the BBC of “splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021” in order to ”intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said.” It seeks $5 billion in damages for defamation and $5 billion for unfair trade practices.
The broadcaster apologized last month to Trump over the edit of the speech he gave before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. But the publicly funded BBC rejected claims it had defamed him, after Trump threatened legal action.
BBC chairman Samir Shah had called the edit an “error of judgment,” which triggered the resignations of the BBC’s top executive and its head of news.
▶ Read more about the lawsuit
President Donald Trump speaks during a Mexican Border Defense Medal presentation in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Dec. 15, 2025, in Washington, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, looks on. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
