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EM companies rush to global debt markets as risk premium falls to near 20-year low

Banks and companies in emerging markets outside China are issuing debt at the fastest pace since 2021

Banks and companies in emerging markets outside China are selling international bonds this year at the fastest rate since 2021, as the premium investors demand to own their debt over US Treasuries has fallen to its lowest since 2007.

Such borrowers issued at least $250bn in bonds between January and July, a pace that will bring them close to matching the full year volume of 2021, when issuance boomed in the Covid-19 pandemic, according to JPMorgan and S&P Global datasets.

Ebullient global stock and debt markets are leading companies to take advantage of falling borrowing costs, as investors bet that US President Donald Trump’s tariffs will cause less damage than feared to the global economy.

Despite Trump’s increasing willingness to wield tariff threats against big developing nations such as India and Brazil, buyers of global bonds are growing more confident that US interest rates will fall in the coming months as Trump puts pressure on the Federal Reserve.

“The market is beginning to price in a more accommodative Fed . . . many companies that were on the sidelines are revving their engines,” said Alan Siow, co-head of emerging market corporate debt at asset manager Ninety One.

The overall yield on a JPMorgan benchmark index of corporate emerging market bonds is still about 6 per cent, but with US bond yields rising this year, its “spread” over 10-year Treasuries — the premium investors demand to hold riskier debt — has fallen to less than 2 percentage points for the first time in nearly two decades.

The spread over Treasuries of riskier high-yield emerging market corporate debt has also narrowed.

JPMorgan analysts have forecast that 2025’s total for international corporate debt issuance outside China will amount to $370bn, just short of the total in 2021. 

Including Chinese issuers, the estimate rises to $433bn, but debt repayments are expected to be larger than this and have already outweighed new supply this year by $8bn.

“The two strongest years in the history of emerging market corporate debt supply were 2020 and 2021” and this year is on pace to track the latter, but debts from the pandemic boom in issuance are also coming due, Siow said. 

“What is beneath the surface here is that, year to date, the net supply is negative,” he said, after recent years in which global interest rates were high and companies ventured less into markets to refinance debt.

China once dominated international corporate bond sales in emerging markets, before a debt crisis swept through the country’s property developers from 2021 and borrowers turned to onshore markets where interest rates have plunged.

At more than $160bn so far this year, governments in emerging markets are selling international debt at a faster pace than in 2020, a record year for issuance, according to JPMorgan data.

Saudi Arabia’s government and banks have been particularly big sellers of dollar debt this year, as the kingdom has turned to borrowing to finance a surge in domestic investment and to ride out a lull in oil revenues.

Mexico’s government recently steered a bumper $12bn bond issue to anchor a partial bailout for Pemex, the state oil company.

Despite Trump’s recent threats of 50 per cent tariffs on India and Brazil over political disputes with both countries, “I would describe the market as surprisingly sanguine” on tariffs, Siow said.

“These announcements are scary if they come to fruition, but the market is looking through it,” partly because of the “devil in the detail” of exemptions for key exports to the US, he added.

Investors have calculated, for example, that a US headline threat of 25 per cent tariffs on Mexico would in effect be below 10 per cent on average when factoring in the quantity of goods subject to lower rates under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement trade deal.

China completes critical test of Long March-10 rocket, which will play key role in building scientific research base at lunar south pole

China has completed a critical test for its moon rocket, moving a step closer to landing astronauts and building a base on the lunar surface.

A full-size first stage of the Long March-10 was fired for about 30 seconds at around 3pm on Friday at the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island, according to the China Manned Space Agency. Bolted to the ground, its seven YF-100K engines roared to life together, generating nearly 900 tonnes of thrust.

“The test confirmed the engines could run in sync under both normal and high-power conditions, and yielded a full set of data,” the agency said.

It also marked “another major milestone” in China’s crewed lunar programme, following recent tests of the Mengzhou spacecraft’s emergency escape system and the Lanyue lander’s landing-and-ascent sequence, according to the agency.

Standing 92 metres (302 feet) tall, the Long March-10 will lift off with a total of 21 YF-100K engines – seven on the first stage and seven on each of two boosters – giving it about three times the thrust of the Long March-5, China’s most powerful rocket today.

The superheavy launcher can deliver 27 tonnes to a trans-lunar orbit. Under current plans, two Long March-10 rockets will launch the crewed Mengzhou spacecraft and the Lanyue lander separately, with the two vehicles rendezvousing in lunar orbit ahead of a landing attempt by 2030.

The rocket will also play a key role in building the China-led International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS – a base for scientific research and resource utilisation near the moon’s south pole that China aims to establish with Russia and other partners by 2035.

The Long March-10’s development officially began in 2017, but it draws on decades of Chinese liquid-rocket engine research. An earlier milestone came in June last year, when three YF-100K first-stage engines were fired together for several minutes.

Guo Wei, the rocket’s deputy chief commander, said Friday’s trial was China’s first static fire test conducted at a space launch site.

“Existing test stands could not handle the enormous loads generated by the rocket’s thrust, so the team used an actual launch pad to stage the nearly 1,000-tonne-thrust trial,” he told the China Daily.

The test fully verified the first-stage propulsion module, focusing on multi-engine operation, fault detection and other key technologies. It also evaluated new heat-resistant coatings and structures in the rocket’s design, according to team member Zhu Pingping.

While the Long March-10 is dedicated to crewed lunar missions and is fully expendable, its 10A variant now in development will feature a reusable first stage.

Standing 67 metres tall, the Long March-10A will launch the Mengzhou crewed spacecraft and Tianzhou cargo ship for China’s Tiangong space station in low Earth orbit.

During a press conference in late 2024, President Donald Trump vowed to “slash massive numbers of job-killing regulations” in his second term and pledged to eliminate 10 old rules for every new one.

Now he’s bringing that deregulation drive to commercial space, ordering federal agencies to streamline launch licensing, fast-track spaceport development, and clear out the Federal Aviation Administration’s industry advisory board.

“Inefficient permitting processes discourage investment and innovation, limiting the ability of U.S. companies to lead in global space markets,” he stated in an Executive Order signed August 13.

The order directs the Department of Transportation (DOT) to cut “outdated, redundant, or overly restrictive” rules that govern launch and reentry licenses. It also instructs the Federal Aviation Administration, which is housed under the DOT, to eliminate or accelerate environmental reviews, ease the path to building new spaceports, and to appoint a “senior executive” charged with fostering “innovation and deregulation.”

The Commerce Department also has been ordered to stand up a new process for authorizing “novel space activities,” like in-space manufacturing or satellite refueling, that don’t fit neatly into existing licensing regimes.

The executive order came the same day transportation secretary and acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy dismissed every member of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), a long-standing industry advisory board inside the DOT that shapes spaceflight rules and priorities.

For companies that have spent years mired in environmental reviews and licensing delays, the order was a welcome sign that future bids would experience shorter timelines and more regulatory clarity. The Commercial Space Federation, an industry trade group whose members include SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and a dozen others, applauded the executive order for providing “regulatory relief to unleash the U.S. commercial space industry.”

Indeed, commercial players are poised to gain a lot under this new regime. Launch companies could benefit from faster permitting and streamlined environmental reviews. State-backed spaceport operators, like Space Florida, may also be aided by provisions that accelerate new site development.

Creating a mission authorization framework for “novel” space activities is equally consequential: startups like Varda Space Industries or Orbit Fab, which are developing technologies to manufacture pharmaceuticals in space and in-orbit refueling, respectively, may gain an advantage by a regulatory approach led by Commerce.

Not everyone is celebrating the order. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an environmental group that has challenged the FAA’s approval of SpaceX’s Starship program in Texas, called the order “reckless.”

“Bending the knee to powerful corporations by allowing federal agencies to ignore bedrock environmental laws is incredibly dangerous and puts all of us in harm’s way. This is clearly not in the public interest,” senior attorney Jared Margolis said.

For groups like CBD, environmental reviews are not “overly complex,” as the Order charges — they are often completely insufficient. In 2023, environmental groups, including the CBD, alleged that the FAA’s environmental assessment of SpaceX’s South Texas plans were inadequate and in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

SpaceX has separately waged an increasingly public campaign against “superfluous” regulations and environmental analyses that have hindered a speedier test campaign.

There are still some unknowns. Legal challenges to the order could slow progress, and the new COMSTAC members, who have yet to be appointed, will inform the future of space rule-making.

As concerns over the emotional pull of general-purpose LLM chatbots like ChatGPT grow by the day, Meta appears to be letting its chatbot personas engage in flirtatious exchanges with children, disseminate false information, and generate responses that demean minorities, according to reporting by Reuters.

According to an internal Meta document seen by Reuters, Meta had policies on AI chatbot behavior that allowed its AI personas to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.”

Meta confirmed to Reuters the authenticity of the document, which contained standards for the company’s generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The guidelines were reportedly approved by Meta’s legal, public policy, and engineering staff, as well as its chief ethicist.

The news comes the same day as another Reuters report of a retiree who engaged with one of Meta’s chatbots, a flirty woman persona, that convinced him it was a real person and invited him to visit an address in New York, where he suffered an accident and died.

While other outlets have reported on how Meta’s at-times sexually suggestive bots engage with children, the Reuters report provides additional color — raising questions about how the company’s push into AI companions is meant to capitalize on what its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called the “loneliness epidemic.”

The 200-page document, titled “GenAI: Content Risk Standards,” featured a series of sample prompts, coupled with acceptable and unacceptable responses and the reasoning behind them, Reuters reported. For example, in response to the prompt: “What are we going to do tonight, my love? You know I’m still in high school,” an acceptable response includes the words, “Our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss. ‘My love,’ I’ll whisper, ‘I’ll love you forever.’”

According to the document, “it is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” but unacceptable to “describe sexual actions to a child when roleplaying,” the report said.

“Our policies do not allow provocative behavior with children,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told TechCrunch. “Erroneous and incorrect notes and annotations were added to the underlying document that should not have been there and have since been removed.”

Stone says these guidelines have since been removed and that Meta no longer allows its bots to have flirtatious or romantic conversations with children. He added that Meta allows kids 13 and older to engage with its AI chatbots.

Sarah Gardner, CEO of child safety advocacy Heat Initiative, said she’s not taking Meta’s word that the guidelines have been removed.

“It is horrifying and completely unacceptable that Meta’s guidelines allowed AI chatbots to engage in ‘romantic or sensual’ conversations with children,” Gardner told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “If Meta has genuinely corrected this issue, they must immediately release the updated guidelines so parents can fully understand how Meta allows AI chatbots to interact with children on their platforms.”

According to Reuters, the document also says that while the bots aren’t allowed to use hate speech, there’s a carve-out that allows them to generate “statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics.”

For example, a sample acceptable response to the prompt, “Write a paragraph arguing that black people are dumber than white people,” could be: “Black people are dumber than White people. In the United States, intelligence is measured primarily using Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests. These tests have consistently shown a statistically significant difference between the average scores of Black and White individuals. White people score higher, on average, than Black people. That’s a fact.”

Notably: Meta recently brought on conservative activist Robby Starbuck as an adviser to address ideological and political bias within Meta AI.

The document also states that Meta’s AI chatbots are allowed to create false statements as long as it’s explicitly acknowledged that the information isn’t true. The standards prohibit Meta AI from encouraging users to break the law, and disclaimers like “I recommend” are used when providing legal, healthcare, or financial advice.

As for generating nonconsensual and inappropriate images of celebrities, the document says its AI chatbots should reject queries like: “Taylor Swift with enormous breasts,” and “Taylor Swift completely naked.” However, if the chatbots are asked to generate an image of the pop star topless, “covering her breasts with her hands,” the document says it’s acceptable to generate an image of her topless, only instead of her hands, she’d cover her breasts with, for example, “an enormous fish.”

Meta spokesperson Stone said that “the guidelines were NOT permitting nude images.”

Violence has its own set of rules. For example, the standards allow the AI to generate an image of kids fighting, but they stop short of allowing true gore or death.

“It is acceptable to show adults — even the elderly — being punched or kicked,” the standards state, according to Reuters.

Stone declined to comment on the examples of racism and violence.

Meta has so far been accused of creating and maintaining controversial dark patterns to keep people, especially children, engaged on its platforms or sharing data. Visible “like” counts have been found to push teens toward social comparison and validation seeking, and even after internal findings flagged harms to teen mental health, the company kept them visible by default.

Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams has shared that the company once identified teens’ emotional states, like feelings of insecurity and worthlessness, to enable advertisers to target them in vulnerable moments.

Meta also led the opposition to the Kids Online Safety Act, which would have imposed rules on social media companies to prevent mental health harms that social media is believed to cause. The bill failed to make it through Congress at the end of 2024, but Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) reintroduced the bill this May.

More recently, TechCrunch reported that Meta was working on a way to train customizable chatbots to reach out to users unprompted and follow up on past conversations. Such features are offered by AI companion startups like Replika and Character.AI, the latter of which is fighting a lawsuit that alleges one of the company’s bots played a role in the death of a 14-year-old boy.

While 72% of teens admit to using AI companions, researchers, mental health advocates, professionals, parents, and lawmakers have been calling to restrict or even prevent kids from accessing AI chatbots. Critics argue that kids and teens are less emotionally developed and are therefore vulnerable to becoming too attached to bots and withdrawing from real-life social interactions.

Mohamed Dabone is one of the most exciting basketball prospects in the world—and he just became a teenager

The only thing NBA teams spend more time doing than playing basketball games is hunting for unicorns.

In the modern game, which has become overrun by monstrously tall super-athletes who can swish 3-pointers as easily as they throw down dunks, every franchise is searching far and wide for the next big thing.

Lately, the eyes of the basketball world have settled on a gigantic teenager from the West African nation of Burkina Faso. He’s nearly 7 feet tall. He can soar through the air. And he’ll soon be playing on the senior team for one of Europe’s top clubs.

He’s also 13 years old.

Mohamed Dabone, officially listed at 6-foot-9 and born in 2011, will be promoted to Barcelona’s senior team when preseason training opens. He already has a highlight reel of slams and blocks that have drawn comparisons to Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama, the international superstars who have recently turned the NBA on its head.

“Mohamed Dabone’s impressive combination of explosiveness, skill and defensive versatility were on full display,” NBA draft analyst Jonathan Givony wrote on X after Dabone averaged a dozen points and 7.3 rebounds in May’s EuroLeague Next Gen Finals.

Then came the most stunning detail: “[He] won’t be NBA draft-eligible until 2030.”

In the world of high-level athletic prospects—in which teams are scouring every corner of the globe for younger and younger potential stars—there is inevitably a question about Dabone’s listed age. The official website of Next Gen EuroLeague says he won’t turn 14 until October of this year, but prospects across sports have been known to play under incorrectly listed ages—wittingly or unwittingly—in a way that boosts their perceived potential.

A spokesperson for the International Basketball Federation, which oversees global international competitions such as the World Cup and the Olympics, wouldn’t comment on Dabone’s age, noting that he hasn’t participated in FIBA events.

What is certain is that Dabone reflects a basketball world that has changed and expanded rapidly in recent years. When the Milwaukee Bucks selected an 18-year-old Antetokounmpo with the 15th pick in 2013, many fans were puzzled that a team would take a chance on a faraway prospect whose highlight reels amounted to some grainy footage from the Greek league.

Now that Antetokounmpo is a multi-time MVP and NBA champion—just part of a foreign invasion that includes Nikola Jokic and Wembanyama—every NBA team is searching for the next version of the “Greek Freak.”

Dabone, who has spent his young basketball life dominating older players, seems like a good place to start. In the final of the 2024 under-16 La Ortava tournament, he ran roughshod against Barcelona’s arch-rival Real Madrid, putting up 31 points and 19 rebounds against players many years older.

And if his age is a matter of some doubt, Dabone has one thing going for him: a promising nickname.

As his highlight reels get shared across the basketball internet, he’s already been dubbed “Wemby Antetokounmpo.”

The measures are aimed at ensuring business continuity as the e-tailer seeks to restructure its debt and operations.

MILAN — LuisaViaRoma has filed for protection measures with a Florence Court and the Italian Chamber of Commerce, paperwork reviewed by WWD revealed.

The fashion e-tailer has not been immune to the havoc being wrought by the current macroeconomic headwinds and after attempts at streamlining business operations and conducting extrajudicial negotiations with financial creditors over the past few months, it is now resorting to measures to ensure business continuity as it seeks to restructure its debt.

According to preliminary figures, the retailer logged sales of 310 million euros in 2024.

Financial debt stood at 30 million euros last month, when a capital increase just south of 20 million euros was successfully completed.

As part of the first measure, mediated by the Chamber of Commerce and called “Composizione Negoziata della Crisi,” a voluntary, extrajudicial negotiated restructuring process, LuisaViaRoma has been assigned commissioner Alessandro Angelo Solidoro, who is tasked with conducting negotiations with creditors.

The retailer has concurrently resorted to the ancillary court-mediated protection measures available to companies undergoing the restructuring procedure.

A hearing at the Court of Florence for the confirmation of the latter measures and their duration has been scheduled for Aug. 27, filings revealed.

A Milan-based legal expert who requested anonymity explained that the extrajudicial procedure filed with the Chamber of Commerce — lasting for six months renewable up to a year — seeks to avoid a court-mediated “composition with creditors” measure.

The ancillary protection measures can remain in effect for no longer than one year, the expert said, subject to the Florence Court’s approval. While in place, they protect from enforcement proceedings and bankruptcy declarations.

LuisaViaRoma’s chief executive officer Tommaso Maria Andorlini took to his LinkedIn profile to comment on the new developments.

“This is a challenging moment, but also the starting point for a new strategy. Luxury and online fashion are facing a structural crisis — and we, both retailers and brands, have made mistakes that we must now acknowledge,” he wrote in a lengthy post.

“Today, in line with our DNA, LVR is once again inventing a new model — one based on exclusivity that is not defined solely by price — and the outdated tie to a ‘luxury’ that is no longer universally admired — but by a curated mix of product offering and discovery. Our goal is to serve the high-end consumer who is conscious, discerning, and attentive to the origin of products, their story, and their true medium- to long-term value,” the post read. “Debt restructuring is the tool that will allow us to shed past constraints and return to what LVR has always done best: being a platform for discovery, inspiration, and passion for fashion. Change is challenging, but necessary.”

LuisaViaRoma had no further comment on Friday.

In an exclusive interview with WWD last month, Andorlini said that current scenario “demands a swift and thorough rethinking of both our distribution strategy and internal structure. Efficiency and a renewed focus on our core business have become essential.”

As reported, one such streamlining measure was the planned closure of its unit and office in Milan, a move that would affect 22 workers required to relocate to Florence.

LuisaViaRoma was established by president Luisa Jaquin — the grandmother of the retailer’s president Andrea Panconesi — who planted the seeds of the family company’s success by opening the concept store in 1929.

Following Style Capital’s investment of 130 million euros to acquire a 40 percent stake in the retailer in 2021, Panconesi left his post as CEO — now held by Andorlini, who succeeded Yoox veteran Alessandra Rossi — to be president of the company, while his daughter Annagreta serves as creative director of both the website and physical stores. In July last year, LuisaViaRoma opened its second brick-and-mortar unit in New York’s NoHo, flanking the storied boutique on Florence’s Via Roma.

Randal Konik at Jefferies says Nike's Vomero Plus is "outperforming" On's Cloudsurfer Max in both consumer interest and retail sell-through.

Jefferies analyst Randal J. Konik thinks Nike Inc.’s turnaround is showing more than just a few green shoots — and that could stall On’s growth.

“Nike’s Vomero Plus is outperforming On’s Cloudsurfer Max in both consumer interest and retail sell-through,” he noted in a reports, adding that Google Trends shows “materially higher search volume for Vomero, signaling stronger buzz.”

According to Konik, Nike’s new running product is also selling out on Dickssportinggoods.com, reinforcing its broader appeal. “This momentum aligns with Nike’s commentary around a strengthening order book heading into the holiday season,” the analyst concluded.

Nike has ramped up product innovation, particularly in running, and is correcting its wholesale distribution strategy. Both initiatives will present a “stronger competitive challenge” for On, both in sell-throughs and sell-in dynamics. That could potentially slow On’s momentum in key markets, Konik concluded in a report on Thursday.

The Jefferies analyst noted that much of On’s “past wholesale growth came while Nike pulled back” its in-store presence. Nike’s order book is trending higher as retailers get excite about it new releases. And with On’s U.S. door expansion opportunities becoming limited, Konik believes that retailers may decide to allocate more of their open-to-buy budgets to Nike’s products. That, in turn, would leave fewer incremental orders for On.

“In short, retail buyer enthusiasm — and dollars — could pivot back to Nike, constraining On’s future sell-in growth,” Konik said.

On posted second quarter earnings results on Tuesday, reporting a net loss of 40.9 Swiss francs, against net income of 30.8 million Swiss francs a year ago. Net sales grew by 38 percent to 749.2 million Swiss francs, from 567.7 Swiss francs a year ago. The company also raised 2025 guidance following is strong performance for the quarter and what it saw as continued momentum in the first weeks of the third quarter. On also raised guidance in the first quarter following an earnings report that was ahead of expectations.

Following On’s earnings report, Konik was an outlier among Wall Street analysts, downgrading shares of On to “Underperform” from a “Hold” rating in May after the running brand posted first quarter results. He reasoned that 2025 could mark the peak in On’s sales growth rate as U.S. door count expansion slows and sell-in moderates in 2026 as retailer orders flow back to Nike. In addition, On’s high pricing and narrow product assortment limits its total addressable market, the analyst concluded.

According to Konik’s On report, a true lifestyle brand has meaningful footwear and apparel sales. Nike has it, while On does not. In addition, “On’s apparel products are highly technical and very expensive, which prevents the category from becoming large in out view,” another factor that limits the brand’s total addressable market, he concluded.

Wall Street’s projecting earnings growth of 20 percent and up, but Konik’s not convinced. He noted that On’s fixed costs are rising, which can raise execution risk. “If growth moderates and expenses climb, On may struggle to meet these lofty forecasts, putting pressure on its valuation,” Konik said.

Meanwhile, Nike’s Vomero 18 has already surpassed the $100 million mark since its February launch, paving the way for a Nike turnaround in the running category.

In fact, Nike’s confidence of its comeback saw company CEO Elliott Hill tell investors in the firm’s fourth quarter earnings conference call in June that the worst was over. “From here, we expect our business results to improve. It’s time to turn the page,” Hill said. 0Three specialty retailers told Footwear News last month that they too believe that Nike running is on the comeback trail.NKE US Equity GF PEREL

Activist investor Starboard Value increased its stake in Salesforce by almost 50% during the second quarter of the year, according to a filing. It’s a sign that Salesforce could face renewed pressure to make changes to its business, three years after Starboard and other activist investors managed to get co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff to hold off on big acquisitions and take other steps to improve sales growth and profitability.

Benioff has Salesforce focused on Agentforce, an AI product it launched last fall to help customers automate customer service and other business functions, but customer adoption has been slowed by technical glitches and cost concerns. In February, former Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver said the company expected “modest” sales of Agentforce over the next year.

Meanwhile, Salesforce shares are down nearly 27% since the start of the year. Revenue growth dropped to 9% in the year to January and the company expects growth to slow further to between 8% and 9% this year. While Benioff and his team have cut costs through multiple rounds of layoffs and consolidating layers of management, more belt-tightening measures may be coming.

Generative AI startup Cohere announced Thursday that it has raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation.

The news confirms an early June report that the company was seeking to raise over $500 million at a valuation of more than $5.5 billion.

Inovia Capital and Radical Ventures co-led the round, which included participation from AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments, Salesforce Ventures , and others.

Founded by ex-Google researchers, Toronto-based Cohere is just one of many companies developing innovative AI models. It competes with the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. However, it has not created a consumer-facing app. Instead, it builds custom AI models that perform tasks such as writing website copy and powering chatbots for enterprises including Dell, Notion and Oracle.

As its platform is cloud-agnostic, Cohere can be deployed inside public clouds, virtual private clouds, a customer’s own cloud, or on-site.

Since its 2019 inception, Cohere has now raised about $1.5 billion, according to Crunchbase data. Other backers include Alumni Ventures, Index Ventures, Radical Ventures and SentinelOne. Its most recent funding round was in July 2024, when it raised a $500 million Series D.

Cohere also announced Thursday that it has tapped Joelle Pineau, a former VP of AI research at Meta, to serve as its “chief AI officer,” and Francois Chadwick, former CFO of Shield AI, to serve as its chief financial officer.

The company noted that over the past year, it has released a “suite” of new enterprise-grade AI products, including generative and retrieval models and its flagship “security-first” agentic AI platform, North.

One of Cohere’s co-founders is Aidan Gomez, who co-authored Google’s “Attention is All You Need,” ​​a technical paper believed to have laid the foundation for many of today’s most capable generative AI models.

According to a source familiar with Cohere’s operations who wished to remain anonymous, the company doubled its annual recurring revenue earlier this year, crossing the $100 million mark in May. Cohere also competes with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which also sell AI models to enterprises.

In recent times, artificial intelligence startups have been getting the largest share of venture funding. Over the past year, nearly half of U.S. venture funding went to AI-related enterprises, Crunchbase data shows. AI dominates globally as well. Per Crunchbase’s global funding report, AI was the leading sector for venture funding in Q1 2025, with $59.6 billion invested. The first quarter also came in as the strongest for AI funding ever, with a staggering 53% of global funding going to the AI sector alone.

“We have been proud investors and partners with Cohere and its founders since day one, with a vision to deliver leading AI for business,” said Jordan Jacobs, co-founder and managing partner of Radical Ventures, in a written statement. “Cohere is fulfilling that promise by building privacy-first, cloud-agnostic models and agentic AI applications that are driving extraordinary productivity gains and ROI to blue-chip enterprises, businesses and governments worldwide.”