SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 30, 2026--
Pegasus Tech Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based global venture capital firm and leading provider of Venture Capital-as-a-Service (VCaaS) solutions, today announced the launch of a corporate Venture Capital (CVC) fund in partnership with Asteria Corporation, a Tokyo-based software company enabling seamless connectivity between systems, people, and data. The initiative marks Asteria’s first CVC fund and is designed to accelerate collaboration with startups developing next-generation technologies aligned with Asteria’s long-term strategy.
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Pegasus Tech Ventures will serve as the General Partner of the fund, and Asteria Corporation will participate as the sole Limited Partner. The fund will invest in innovative startups developing technologies across artificial intelligence, automation, edge computing, and intelligent data infrastructure.
Founded in 1998 as Japan’s first XML-focused software company, Asteria develops software platforms centered on no-code integration and data connectivity. The company’s flagship product, Asteria Warp, is one of Japan’s leading integration programs and is used by more than 10,000 companies. In addition to Asteria Warp, the company develops software and services supporting mobile business applications and digital integration across enterprise environments.
Asteria has already been a Limited Partner in other Pegasus Tech Ventures-managed funds that have invested into companies including SpaceX. Through this dedicated partnership, Pegasus Tech Ventures will leverage its global venture platform and Silicon Valley ecosystem to provide Asteria with emerging startups and breakthrough technologies. The collaboration is intended to strengthen Asteria’s open innovation strategy and support the company’s continued efforts to help organizations integrate systems, applications, and data across increasingly complex digital environments.
“We are pleased to partner with Pegasus Tech Ventures on this corporate venture capital initiative,” said Yoichiro Hirano, President & CEO, Asteria Corporation. “By working closely with startups and entrepreneurs worldwide, we aim to accelerate innovation and strengthen Asteria’s mission of connecting the world through software.”
“We look forward to supporting Asteria’s innovation initiatives through Pegasus’ global network of startup ecosystem,” said Anis Uzzaman, Founder & CEO, Pegasus Tech Ventures. “By leveraging our global network, we aim to help Asteria identify breakthrough technologies and build strategic relationships with innovative startups around the world.”
About Asteria Corporation
Asteria is a software development company that provides products and services that “connect” systems, people, things and intentions based on the concept of “Connecting the World with Software”. Its flagship product, “ASTERIA Warp” is middleware which integrates data from different systems and cloud services without coding and has been adopted by over 10,000 companies. Other products include digital storage app “Handbook X”, mobile app builder “Platio” and no-code AI/IoT platform “Gravio”. By offering these products, Asteria promotes digital transformation (DX) and helps organizations improve their business process efficiency. Asteria is also engaged in raising awareness of new technologies and their value and fosters innovation through its involvement in the launch of Blockchain Collaborative Consortium and No Code Promotion Association. For more information, please visit https://en.asteria.com/.
About Pegasus Tech Ventures
Pegasus Tech Ventures is a global venture capital firm and leading provider of Venture Capital-as-a-Service (VCaaS) solutions. The firm partners with corporations worldwide to help them access emerging technologies, invest in innovative startups, and accelerate Open Innovation initiatives through its global network spanning the world’s leading innovation ecosystems. Pegasus manages over 40 funds and over US $2B in assets, and has invested in more than 300 startups globally, including SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Airbnb, Coinbase, and X (formerly Twitter). Through its corporate venture platform, Pegasus serves as a bridge between global corporations and the next generation of technology companies. For more information, please visit www.pegasustechventures.com/.
Pegasus Tech Ventures and Asteria Corporation Launch Corporate Venture Capital Fund to Advance Global Connectivity and Innovation
The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The decision, in line with the longstanding judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment, comes on the final day of a Supreme Court term that has centered on Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power — and largely ruled in his favor.
In its other Tuesday rulings, the court upheld laws in roughly half the states that prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on their public school and college sport teams and struck down limits on party spending in federal elections.
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“Birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens will continue to be a ballooning negative consequence of the failure to enforce our immigration laws,” said Dale Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “But that very fact makes it all the more urgent to step up enforcement to the maximum possible extent and end illegal immigration.”
The president has made his opposition to transgender athletes a key feature of his speeches and he embraced the Supreme Court decision that states can ban the athletes from girls and women’s teams.
“BIG WIN,” Trump said on social media. “Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!”
“The Justices rightly recognized that the U.S. Constitution is clear and unambiguous: if you are born in this country and subject to its jurisdiction, you are a citizen of this country,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that works with immigrants, said in a statement. “Birthright citizenship survived the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, and today, it survived an executive order that would have essentially turned the maternity ward into a customs checkpoint.”
“Today, the Supreme Court defended the soul of this country and the very definition of what it means to be an American,” Voto Latino President Maria Teresa Kumar said in a statement.
She added: “By reaffirming that every child born on American soil is a citizen, the court chose to embrace our multiracial and multicultural reality, rather than succumb to a political agenda rooted in the fear of it.”
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment. “We keep that promise today.”
Unlike much of the world, birthright citizenship is common across North, Central and South America. Many legal historians believe the roots of that geographic divide reach back more than 500 years, when European nations began sending settlers to their American colonies.
Europe’s aristocrat rulers wanted to encourage people to move to the colonies, but those colonists wanted their children — even if born overseas — to hold on to their European citizenship.
The practice remained in place as independence movements began to take shape and as independent nations began to emerge.
“By then, their legal traditions had already started to form,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. “So by and large they continued some of the key legal practices of the colonial European governments that they had just severed ties with.”
“Trump’s attempted assault on the 14th Amendment was dealt a major blow today. This decision is a powerful affirmation of the Constitution and the enduring promise of equality it represents,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “For over 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to everyone born in this country. Today, the court rightly rejected efforts to undermine that core protection and instead upheld a principle that is essential to our democracy.”
Many of those pages are from the dissent penned by Justice Thomas and joined by Gorsuch. The majority opinion is 26 pages long, Thomas’s dissent runs to 91 pages.
In upholding a broad conception of birthright citizenship, the court rejected President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The justices relied on a long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, and more recent federal laws in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.
The Republican president’s restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the U.S.
During arguments in April, both conservative and liberal justices questioned the order’s legality in a momentous case that was magnified by Trump’s unprecedented attendance in the courtroom.
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“Today’s news has nothing to do with safety or fairness in sports,” Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement. “These rulings only serve to send a message to transgender and nonbinary young people that says, ‘you don’t belong.’”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday erased limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and president, striking down a federal election law that’s more than 50 years old.
Prodded by a Republican-led lawsuit that includes Vice President JD Vance, the court’s conservative justices were again in the majority of the latest decision that upended congressionally enacted limits on raising and spending money to influence elections. The court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the door to unlimited independent spending in federal elections.
The limits on party spending stem from a desire to prevent large donors from skirting caps on individual contributions to a candidate by directing unlimited sums to the party, with the understanding that the money will be spent on behalf of the candidate.
The Supreme Court had previously upheld the limits in 2001.
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“The Supreme Court gave cover to a campaign whose stated goal is to deny constitutional projections to trans people,” Imara Jones, CEO of TransLash Media, said in a statement. “The ultimate objective is to establish the cocktail of laws and systemic marginalization that will allow those in power to exclude larger and larger groups of Americans.”
“Sports are generally zero sum,” Kavanaugh said in the majority opinion. “Every biological male who makes the team takes a roster spot from a female athlete. Every biological male who earns playing time reduces the playing time of a female athlete. Every biological male who starts takes a starting position from a female athlete. Every biological male who wins a race takes the gold medal away from a female athlete.”
The ruling is another setback for transgender people.
The court’s conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well.
Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
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The justices are weighing Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions, one of several courts that have blocked them.
Trump signed the birthright citizenship order on the first day of his second term, but the restrictions have not taken effect anywhere in the country.
In oral arguments, Sauer, the lawyer for Trump’s administration, said that birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration and “rewards illegal aliens who not only violate the immigration laws but also jump in front of those who follow the rules.”
The practice “demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship,” he told the court.
But the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging Trump’s order, sees it very differently.
“It’s one of the clearest statements of who we are as a country,” the ACLU said in a statement. “No matter who your parents are, if you’re born here, you belong here.”
Most Americans say they believe in birthright citizenship, though many are conflicted about exactly who it should apply to.
An April survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research of more than 2,500 U.S. adults found that about two-thirds say children born in the U.S. should get automatic citizenship. That number drops to 44% for Republicans.
But the poll also showed ambivalence when it came to specifics.
For example, 75% of U.S. adults support automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents in the country on work visas. Only about half, though, believe in it for children born to parents who are illegally in the country.
The 5-4 decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day.
The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
In just over half of those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.
During oral arguments, even many conservative justices appeared unconvinced by the government’s case.
“I can imagine it being messy in some applications,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, asking Solicitor General D. John Sauer about the issue of abandoned infants.
“What if you don’t know who the parents are?” she asked.
Sauer started to say that question was addressed in the U.S. code, but Barrett quickly interrupted him.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about the Constitution?” she asked.
Outside of the Americas, most countries follow the legal principle of jus sanguinis, or “right of blood,” with a child’s citizenship inherited from its parents, no matter the place of birth.
In the European Union, for example, no member states grant automatic, unconditional citizenship to children born to foreigners.
But American legal practice is descended in many ways from English common law, which had long provided for citizenship based on a child’s place of birth, the legal concept of jus soli, or “right of soil.”
The UK, though, abandoned jus soli with the British Nationality Act of 1981.
Under the new rules, people born in the UK get citizenship only if at least one parent is a British citizen or has “settled status” under the law.
The court will dive right into the remaining decisions when the justices take the bench at 10 a.m. ET.
The opinions are typically read in ascending order of seniority so that the most junior justice with an opinion goes first. Chief Justice John Roberts, who may well have the decision in the birthright citizenship case, would go last.
Other than at the Federal Reserve, with its role of setting interest rates, the court held that presidents have free rein to fire agency heads at will, despite federal laws that require a cause for such dismissals and a 91-year-old decision that had limited executive authority.
The justices allowed Fed governor Lisa Cook to stay in her job while she fights Trump’s effort to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she has denied.
With the six conservative justices in the majority, the nine-member court jettisoned its unanimous decision in Humphrey’s Executor that had limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members — in part to try to ensure decision-making free of political influence.
“We hold that such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.
In separate cases, the court will also decide:
Whether states can prohibit transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s public school and college teams.
Whether to uphold a federal law more than 50 years old limiting how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and the president.
Oral arguments for the case lasted more than two hours in a crowded courtroom that included Trump, the first sitting president to attend arguments at the nation’s highest court, and, in seats reserved for the justices’ guests, actor Robert De Niro.
Trump heard his administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, face one skeptical question after another. Justices asked about the legal basis for the order and voiced more practical concerns.
“Is this happening in the delivery room?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked, drilling down into the logistics of how the government would actually figure out who is entitled to citizenship and who is not.
Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that Sauer was relying on quirky exceptions to citizenship to make a broad argument about people who are in the country illegally. “I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples,” Roberts said.
Justice Clarence Thomas sounded the most likely among the nine justices to side with Trump.
The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
