Category: Semafor

After months of slow progress and noncommittal MOUs, international oil companies are making tangible headway in Venezuela. Oil Minister Paula Henao announced deals with two US firms this week. Oilfield service provider SLB will provide AI software to facilitate drilling, and said it is working to import oil rigs into ...

Rohan’s view Battered-up and bruised software names are having their Regina George moment. Once beloved, then out of style, and now back again. What happens next is anyone’s guess — but private equity is salivating. CEOs, bankers, and investors have all known that the SaaSpocalypse wouldn’t last — there’s too ...

Walmart posted the slowest US sales growth in six years on Thursday, the latest sign that consumers are feeling strapped. Same-store sales missed analyst estimates, with CFO John David Rainey telling CNBC “consumers have been more pressured” than earlier this year. Walmart’s sheer scale makes it a bellwether for Americans’ ...

A tiny biotech deal announced in July is suddenly attracting a lot of attention. Tempus AI agreed to acquire Personalis, a Merck-backed company which provides advanced genomic sequencing and analytics for cancer treatments, for $1.5 billion. It would have passed by without much notice, but Personalis’ technology is crucial to ...

A big hiccup is moving through the global oil trade that’s likely to cause another surge in prices, especially in Asia, over the next few weeks. With tanker traffic out of the Persian Gulf constricted over the past six months, higher exports from other countries, especially the US, have helped ...

The State Department is warning of the “long and challenging” road ahead in addressing the Ebola crisis ravaging parts of Africa, after the epidemic became the deadliest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s history earlier this week. The grim milestone has renewed scrutiny of the US response to the ...

The News When the Carlyle Group decided to get into the madcap data-center dash, it didn’t start by courting hyperscalers or Emirati royals. It called the US Army. This spring Carlyle won a 50-year lease of federal lands in Fort Bliss, Texas, and is negotiating the development of a data ...

President Donald Trump’s latest step away from military escalation in Iran comes as the US side sees talks between Iran and Oman — which had appeared to be a rare fruitful negotiation path — as having stalled in recent days. A US official and a White House official told Semafor ...

President Donald Trump’s on-camera openness to US market access for Hyperliquid, a Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange that allows its users to trade anonymously, won’t thrill its domestic competitors. Intercontinental Exchange Inc. and CME Group Inc. recently urged US officials to rein in the exchange, which they warn could be used to ...

An experimental vaccine prevented the return and spread of cancer in high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and Merck announced Wednesday, a milestone in the pursuit of cancer therapies. Built on the mRNA platform that allowed Moderna to quickly roll out COVID-19 vaccines five years ago, intismeran is a genetically personalized vaccine ...