BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Initial public offerings, better known as IPOs, may seem like big investment opportunities, but a financial adviser is warning they could be a risky addition to your portfolio.

Dan Cunningham of the investment management company One Day in July, said he recommends that people stay away when a company starts selling initial shares on the stock market.

Most recently, Elon Musk’s SpaceX became the biggest IPO ever, but Cunningham said people shouldn’t get caught up in the hoopla.

“They generate a lot of excitement, but when you look at long term results, IPOs have not been a good investment. So we really try to encourage people to stay away from the hype. You are really betting on the future and taking an enormous amount of risk by buying IPO shares in many cases,” Cunningham said.

According to Cunningham, the good news is that, over the long term, the market and most retirement funds that mirror it will balance out.

DULUTH — The Duluth Homegrown Music Festival is seeking both new operational leadership and a solution to financial filing issues that caused the organization to lose its federal tax-exempt status, which it has not held since 2022.

The organization is currently operating as a taxable nonprofit, confirmed Don Ness, the former Duluth mayor who serves as president of Homegrown’s

board of directors.

Ness and the board are working to discern whether there might be any outstanding tax liabilities in the wake of an apparent filing lapse.

“It’s a serious matter that requires diligence to do things right, and to correct past oversight, and to make sure that we are in full compliance with all tax and regulatory requirements,” Ness said. “The board is 100% committed to that course of action.”

As the Duluth Monitor first reported, Homegrown had its federal tax-exempt status revoked in 2022 after failing to make required financial reports for three years. The Monitor also reported that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office has notified the organization it may be in violation of state law requiring the proper registration of soliciting charities.

“All but one of us have been on for less than a year,” Ness said of the current board members. “We’ve been committed to saying, ‘hey, we need to improve the points of accountability.’”

The organization will also require new operational leadership. Co-directors Cory Jezierski and Dereck Murphy-Williams resigned earlier this month, after leading Homegrown through four successful festivals.

“My contract ended at the end of May, and I knew a few days later that I did not want to continue in that position,” Jezierski said. “Simply put, it was the best thing for my mental health. It’s a job that requires many, many hours and a lot of work, and it can be very stressful as well.”

Amy Arntson / Duluth Media Group file photo

Murphy-Williams did not respond to an interview request for this article, nor did preceding Homegrown director Melissa LaTour. According to LaTour’s

LinkedIn profile,

she was Homegrown director from 2016 to 2022.

Jason Beckman, a recent president who is no longer serving on the board, responded to a News Tribune email but did not provide an interview availability before this article went to press.

Ness does not believe the reporting lapses were due to any ill intent. He praised Jezierski and Murphy-Williams for their success managing festival operations. “They cared deeply about the festival,” he said. “It’s amazing to see that our community continues to support this really unique and special festival.”

“Those guys run a hell of a festival,” said Scott Lunt, festival founder and a current board member. “I think they needed help with bookkeeping.”

Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo

Advertisement

By Jezierski’s account, issues with the festival’s tax status became apparent shortly after he became co-director. “We went to file taxes, they were rejected,” Jezierski said. “At that time we, of course, didn’t know why right away, but once we started pulling on that thread, we unraveled a whole lot of the problems that were going on.”

Jezierski said “it took a long time to try to get any sort of help” from the board, but said that by the time he and Murphy-Williams left the organization, “everything had been turned over to be reconciled” with a financial professional.

Ness, like Lunt, was deeply involved with Homegrown in its first decade but had not had an official role with the festival since then. After launching the festival in 1999 and running it on his own for several years, Lunt was “burnt out,” Ness remembered.

Derek Montgomery / Duluth Media Group file photo

Advertisement

After a transition period during which the festival was run in partnership with the Ripsaw newspaper, Homegrown established a nonprofit organization in 2006 with Ness as festival director. Ness subsequently stepped down when he was elected mayor in 2007.

By 2025, Ness was in his current position as executive director of the Ordean Foundation.

“I was approached by a couple of longtime music scenesters,” Ness recalled. “They said, ‘There are questions about (Homegrown’s) nonprofit status. There are questions about some governance issues. We’re concerned.’”

Ness agreed to join the board, and became president. The 2026 festival ran smoothly from an operational standpoint, but Ness found the financial reporting to be lacking.

Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo

“The last board meeting that we had prior to the (co-directors’) resignations was intended to be an overview of the festival that was a month before,” Ness said. “I certainly felt very uncomfortable with how little financial information we were receiving.”

Lunt also joined the board in 2025, marking his first time serving in that capacity. He said the new board has been spending significant time addressing the accounting and reporting issues.

“Every year at Homegrown time I’m like, ‘I should get more involved,’ and then I don’t,” Lunt said. “Then this board thing came up, and it was kind of sold to me as, like, four meetings a year. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s perfect.’ And now we’re meeting weekly.”

Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo

Although it’s unclear how the organization’s finances will look when the accounting and reporting issues have been fully addressed, along with any outstanding tax liabilities, both Ness and Lunt said they are confident the annual festival will continue without interruption.

“The organization will continue,” Ness said. “The festival will continue. Homegrown is in no danger in terms of its viability.” The financial documentation Ness initially received indicated budgeted revenues of about $140,000, against about $130,000 in expenses.

“Financially, I think we’re in a great spot. We have the money to hire the (financial) professionals, and we have (done so),” Lunt said. “We were hoping that we could get all this sorted out before it had to become more public.”

“We poured countless hours into this festival, and this is how it ends, with everyone talking about this,” Jezierski said. “It’s rough.”

“There’s a DIY ethos that is really at the core of Homegrown,” reflected Ness. “We’re throwing a music festival that isn’t waiting for some famous band from the East Coast to bless us with their presence. We are doing this on our own.”

Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo

That DIY spirit also means “you’re kind of passing wisdom down from person to person, and sometimes that’s imperfect.” Ness continued. “The ways that we do things evolve over time, because it’s not a buttoned-down corporate sort of thing. That can create its own set of challenges.”

“It’s self-supporting,” said Lunt about the festival. “It’s widely volunteer-run. You do need to pay a couple people, obviously, to keep track of some things, but it’s going to be strong into the future. It’s gone through its bumps before.”

While most AI in financial services remains advisory, LUMIQ has built the layer that owns the decision — autonomous, auditable AI agents making regulated calls in production at leading banks, insurers, and capital markets firms. Today, LUMIQ serves clients across India, the United States, and Southeast Asia — leading institutions across insurance, banking, and capital markets.

NEW YORK and SINGAPORE, June 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — LUMIQ, an AI-native financial services company, today announced a strategic funding round to scale auto-decisioning for financial institutions across the United States and Southeast Asia. The round was led by Bajaj Finserv, one of India’s largest and most diversified financial services groups, with participation from existing investor Info Edge Ventures.

Right now, thousands of customers are waiting for a policy to be issued, a loan to be disbursed, a claim to be adjudicated, because somewhere an FSI employee is drowning in decisions, held back by the risk of getting it wrong. Today, when e-commerce delivers the same day, banks and insurers still decide in weeks. We built LiteCone to take that burden: AI decides the routine cases, completely and accountably, so humans spend their judgment on the one case that actually needs it. This round lets us bring that to every financial institution in the markets that matter most.
Shoaib Mohammad, Co-founder and CEO, LUMIQ

From AI that assists to AI that decides

For decades, financial institutions have bought technology that made their people faster — faster data, faster scoring, faster copilots. The decision still landed on a human. LUMIQ is changing that. Through its LiteCone platform, the company deploys AI agents that read the file, apply the institution’s own guidelines, and reach the decision end to end — escalating only the cases that genuinely require human judgment. The output is not a recommendation. It is a decision, with full reasoning attached, cross-referenced to policy, and defensible under audit.

The results in production speak clearly. At a leading life insurer, LUMIQ’s LEO agent decides 75–80% of underwriting cases with zero human touch, reduced policy issuance cost by roughly 25%, and compressed turnaround from days to under eight minutes — running 24×7 with complete auditability. Across its client base spanning insurance, banking, and capital markets in India, the US, and Southeast Asia, LUMIQ now processes millions of decisions annually.

LiteCone turns a real financial-services role into a working AI agent in weeks. Every agent we deploy is consistent, explainable, compliant, and auditable by design — not as an afterthought. This capital lets us go deeper on the platform and broader across roles. And through our cloud and AI lab partnerships, institutions will increasingly find LiteCone already embedded in the platforms they run today.
Vaibhav Dobriyal, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, LUMIQ

This round funds four priorities: expanding go-to-market in the US and Southeast Asia; deepening LiteCone’s decisioning capabilities; extending the agent workforce across more financial-services roles; and building a partnership ecosystem with cloud hyperscalers, AI labs, and core banking and insurance platforms so LiteCone is embedded where institutions already run.

LUMIQ’s investors backed the round for the same reason its customers adopt LiteCone: agents already deciding in production, with auditability and control built in.

As a financial-services group, we know how much rests on getting regulated decisions right, at speed and at scale. LUMIQ has built AI agents that decide in production with auditability and control built in, the capability the industry has been moving toward. We are proud to lead this round and to support the team’s expansion across the US and Southeast Asia.
Lakshmi Iyer, Group President – Investments & CEO, Bajaj Alternates

Our conviction is grounded in what LUMIQ has already built. Their AI agents aren’t just built for the future. They are operating in production today, at speed. This combination is rare, and its value will only compound as the company scales globally.
Girish Jhunjhunwala, Fund Manager – PE and VC Investments, Bajaj Alternates

Financial services is one of the hardest categories to crack — regulated, risk-averse, and unforgiving of hype. LUMIQ has put agentic AI into live financial-services workflows and earned the trust of large institutions across the US, Southeast Asia and India. That is how a category-defining company in financial-services AI gets built, and we are proud to keep backing the team as they scale globally.
Kitty Agarwal, Partner, Info Edge Ventures

LUMIQ’s goal is to lead one category: auto-decisioning at production scale for financial services. Agents that act, not assist, and never compromise audit, compliance, or predictability.

About LUMIQ
LUMIQ is an AI-native financial services company. Through its LiteCone platform and a growing workforce of production AI agents, LUMIQ turns real financial-services roles — insurance underwriter, credit underwriter, claims adjudicator — into agents that are consistent, explainable, compliant, and auditable. The company pairs deep domain expertise across banking, insurance, and capital markets with frontier AI. LUMIQ employs over 350 AI and data specialists, and has offices in New Jersey, Singapore, and Delhi NCR (India).

Web: www.lumiq.ai

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/lumiq-raises-strategic-funding-to-become-the-ai-decision-layer-for-financial-services-302805280.html