New store openings in Canada and Texas reflect CoCo's deepening market presence and
robust long-term relationships with franchise partners
TORONTO and LOS ANGELES, Aug. 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading boba tea brand CoCo Bubble Tea today announced a series of key expansion milestones across North America, with a new focus on smaller Canadian cities and continued momentum in the U.S. market. These openings reflect the brand's sustained popularity, cultural integration, and robust support for its franchise network.
"As bubble tea becomes a staple refreshment in North America, we see significant potential for growth outside of major cities," commented Kody Wong, Director of Business Development at CoCo Bubble Tea. "From Alberta to Texas, CoCo's franchise partners are bringing our brand to new communities and increasing access to authentic bubble tea for millions of North American consumers. We are immensely grateful to our partners for the passion and commitment it has taken to accomplish this."
Canada: Going beyond the big cities
Already a top-three brand in Toronto with over 120 stores nationwide, CoCo is now reaching new heights of market penetration:
- Recently opened: Lethbridge, Grand Prairie, Red Deer — bringing authentic CoCo bubble tea to new communities across Alberta.
- Coming soon in 2025: Saskatoon, as the brand extends its footprint deeper into the Canadian Prairie provinces.
U.S. expansion driven by Texas
CoCo opened its first overseas store in the United States in 2011, establishing itself as one of the pioneering new tea brands to expand globally. In 2025, CoCo has identified Texas as a key priority market in its U.S. growth strategy:
- Dallas: Store opened in April 2025
Upcoming franchise activities
CoCo will exhibit at two upcoming major franchise expos in the region:
- Franchise Expo West 2025
Los Angeles Convention Center | Booth #525
September 5–6, 10AM–4PM - Toronto Fall Franchise Show
The International Centre | Booth #148
September 13–14, 11AM–5PM
Culture and community powering success
CoCo's approach to franchising is rooted in trust, support, and building long-term relationships with partners. In Canada, the same franchise partners have been with CoCo for 11 years; in New York City, partners have grown alongside the brand for 14 years — both a testament to CoCo's value-driven model and collaborative culture.
To further spread pearl milk tea culture globally, the brand focuses on harnessing the popularity of the refreshment among younger consumers through social media. Also, employees and partners are referred to as " Boba Squad", a name embodying the resilience and vibrancy of the brand.
In Canada, CoCo has invested heavily in synergies with local cultures. The brand has transformed fan-favorite drinks like its passionfruit series into popsicles now sold in T&T Supermarket locations across the country. In a collaboration with Barbie, CoCo brought "Strawberry Dreamer" drinks to over 100 stores across North America. This further showcases how the brand continues to innovate with purpose and reach younger audiences through pop culture.
Empowering partners
To support franchise partners, CoCo provides robust support tailored to its North American network, including:
- Dedicated logistics and supply chain for the region
- Local operations and consulting teams offering in-person support and business strategy
- Regional training programs
- Product R&D and adaptation for local tastes
- A single-store program that empowers individual entrepreneurs to build community-driven success stories
For franchise inquiries in North America, visit: https://www.coco-tea.com/Franchise
About CoCo Bubble Tea
CoCo Bubble Tea aims to create a diverse and sustainable community for its consumers by providing visually refreshing products. We continue to be one of the fastest-growing companies and are looking for enterprising partners to join the CoCo Bubble Tea franchise networks. Check CoCo Bubble Tea's official website and start your application now.
For more information, please visit https://www.coco-tea.com/.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
CoCo Bubble Tea Expands Deeper into North America with Focus on Smaller Cities
CoCo Bubble Tea Expands Deeper into North America with Focus on Smaller Cities
CoCo Bubble Tea Expands Deeper into North America with Focus on Smaller Cities
- Baidu Co-founder and CEO Robin Li proposed Daily Active Agents (DAA) as the defining metric as the industry enters the agent era.
- The company also unveiled a series of updates to its agent portfolio, including the general-purpose agent DuMate, the app and enterprise edition of the coding agent Miaoda, the upgraded digital human platform Baidu Yijing, and the upgraded self-evolving agent Famou Agent 2.0.
- The new full-stack AI Cloud is purpose-built for large-scale agent applications, set to empower organizations to harness AI at scale.
BEIJING, May 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888), a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation, today introduced a new generation of AI agent products at Baidu Create 2026, its annual developer conference. The lineup includes the general-purpose agent DuMate, the app and enterprise edition of the coding agent Miaoda, the upgraded digital human platform Baidu Yijing, and the upgraded self-evolving agent Famou Agent 2.0.
At Create 2026, Baidu Co-founder and CEO Robin Li made the case that the right metric for measuring success in the AI industry is Daily Active Agents (DAA) — a new index he proposed as the agent era's equivalent of the mobile internet's Daily Active Users (DAU).
Li contended that tokens represent cost, not value, measuring input rather than output. "To measure the health of a platform or ecosystem, we should pay closer attention to DAA — the number of agents actively working and delivering results," he said. Li also predicted that global DAA could eventually surpass 10 billion.
Li put forward what he called an "AI evolution theory," describing a three-layered transformation now underway: agents evolving from passive responders to autonomous executors that continuously learn from their environment; individuals evolving from ordinary users into super individuals who learn to coexist with AI; and enterprises evolving from human-to-human collaboration into mixed human-agent formations that operate as unified, super-organizations.
DuMate: General-Purpose Agent That Redefines What AI Can Do
At Create 2026, Baidu launched the mobile edition of its general-purpose agent DuMate. With full real-time synchronization between mobile and PC, users can now initiate tasks anytime, anywhere, with 24/7 availability. Since its MVP release in March, DuMate has iterated rapidly and is now capable of reading screens, operating software, processing files, and connecting business systems end-to-end. DuMate has achieved state-of-the-art performance across multiple international agent benchmarks. As a general-purpose agent, DuMate is also a unified gateway, according to Li. "It seamlessly integrates Baidu Search AI API, Miaoda coding agent, and Famou Agent, allowing users to collaboratively perform a range of tasks including search, coding, deep research, data analysis, and application creation," Li said.
Miaoda & MeDo: Coding Agent That Makes Software "Disposable"
Miaoda marked another highlight of the event, with the launch of its app and enterprise edition. Miaoda is a coding agent that empowers anyone to bring their ideas to life without writing a single line of code. The new Miaoda app brings professional-grade vibe coding to mobile, with 90% of its own code generated by Miaoda itself. "Coding agents like Miaoda enable people with no coding knowledge to generate applications directly; the barrier is disappearing," Li said. "At the same time, development costs are being compressed to near zero. The software industry is being redefined." Li argued that "disposable software" — apps built for a single purpose and a single moment — is becoming reasonable, and that "this market could grow ten times over." Global developers can already access MeDo, Miaoda's international version, at medo.dev.
Baidu Yijing: Digital Human Is Agent You Can See and Trust
Baidu Yijing, rebranded from the Huiboxing platform, is a full-scenario digital human platform spanning live streaming, video production, and real-time interactive experiences, capable of generating highly interactive content ranging from minutes to several hours in length. "A digital human is simply an agent you can see," Li said. "Equipped with voice, facial expressions, and gestures, a digital human is more expressive and more trustworthy." Baidu Yijing is also taking its digital human capabilities global by launching an international edition that enables merchants and creators to easily generate digital human content, from e-commerce livestreams to digital human videos and beyond. Supporting the platform are three agent capabilities — script writing, video production, and intelligent editing — along with deep localization from the ground up. The platform supports 12 languages with native-level lip-sync accuracy and localized AI-powered content creation, helping merchants run round-the-clock digital human livestreams across multiple global markets.
Reflecting on the above products, Li described a fundamental shift in the basic unit of productive capacity: where it was once a team, it is now a super individual. In the agent era, every developer is simultaneously a builder, founder, and creator.
Famou Agent 2.0: Agent That Self-Verifies and Closes the Loop Can Evolve Without Limit
Baidu's self-evolving agent Famou was upgraded to version 2.0 at Create 2026. A self-evolving agent like Famou is designed to address complex operational challenges across industries and help enterprises unlock meaningful productivity gains. The 2.0 version expands direct accessibility to domain experts across three high-value use cases: production scheduling, process optimization, and logistics planning. Commenting on Famou, Li noted that agents capable of self-verification and closed-loop execution could shift efficiency gains from linear to exponential. At one of the world's most sophisticated automated ports, for instance, Famou Agent autonomously identifies optimal solutions across berth scheduling, equipment allocation, and cargo prioritization, delivering a 10.21% performance improvement on top of an already highly optimized baseline. Famou Agent 2.0 has topped MLE-Bench, winning 9 of the 15 hardest tasks and outperforming agents built on other leading models.
New Full-Stack AI Cloud: The Infrastructure Behind Agents at Scale
Underpinning these agent applications is a series of infrastructure upgrades announced at the same event. Baidu AI Cloud announced a comprehensive upgrade, repositioning itself as a new full-stack AI cloud purpose-built for large-scale agent applications, with upgrades spanning Agent Infra and AI Infra. A dedicated cluster powered by Baidu's proprietary Kunlunxin AI chip has supported the training of a key model in the ERNIE 5.1 series. Earlier in May, Baidu released ERNIE 5.1, its latest foundation model, which ranked #1 among Chinese models on LMArena's text and search leaderboards.
About Baidu
Founded in 2000, Baidu's mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under "BIDU" and HKEX under "9888." One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares.
BEIJING, May 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888), a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation, today introduced a new generation of AI agent products at Baidu Create 2026, its annual developer conference. The lineup includes the general-purpose agent DuMate, the app and enterprise edition of the coding agent Miaoda, the upgraded digital human platform Baidu Yijing, and the upgraded self-evolving agent Famou Agent 2.0.
At Create 2026, Baidu Co-founder and CEO Robin Li made the case that the right metric for measuring success in the AI industry is Daily Active Agents (DAA) — a new index he proposed as the agent era's equivalent of the mobile internet's Daily Active Users (DAU).
Li contended that tokens represent cost, not value, measuring input rather than output. "To measure the health of a platform or ecosystem, we should pay closer attention to DAA — the number of agents actively working and delivering results," he said. Li also predicted that global DAA could eventually surpass 10 billion.
Li put forward what he called an "AI evolution theory," describing a three-layered transformation now underway: agents evolving from passive responders to autonomous executors that continuously learn from their environment; individuals evolving from ordinary users into super individuals who learn to coexist with AI; and enterprises evolving from human-to-human collaboration into mixed human-agent formations that operate as unified, super-organizations.
DuMate: General-Purpose Agent That Redefines What AI Can Do
At Create 2026, Baidu launched the mobile edition of its general-purpose agent DuMate. With full real-time synchronization between mobile and PC, users can now initiate tasks anytime, anywhere, with 24/7 availability. Since its MVP release in March, DuMate has iterated rapidly and is now capable of reading screens, operating software, processing files, and connecting business systems end-to-end. DuMate has achieved state-of-the-art performance across multiple international agent benchmarks. As a general-purpose agent, DuMate is also a unified gateway, according to Li. "It seamlessly integrates Baidu Search AI API, Miaoda coding agent, and Famou Agent, allowing users to collaboratively perform a range of tasks including search, coding, deep research, data analysis, and application creation," Li said.
Miaoda & MeDo: Coding Agent That Makes Software "Disposable"
Miaoda marked another highlight of the event, with the launch of its app and enterprise edition. Miaoda is a coding agent that empowers anyone to bring their ideas to life without writing a single line of code. The new Miaoda app brings professional-grade vibe coding to mobile, with 90% of its own code generated by Miaoda itself. "Coding agents like Miaoda enable people with no coding knowledge to generate applications directly; the barrier is disappearing," Li said. "At the same time, development costs are being compressed to near zero. The software industry is being redefined." Li argued that "disposable software" — apps built for a single purpose and a single moment — is becoming reasonable, and that "this market could grow ten times over." Global developers can already access MeDo, Miaoda's international version, at medo.dev.
Baidu Yijing: Digital Human Is Agent You Can See and Trust
Baidu Yijing, rebranded from the Huiboxing platform, is a full-scenario digital human platform spanning live streaming, video production, and real-time interactive experiences, capable of generating highly interactive content ranging from minutes to several hours in length. "A digital human is simply an agent you can see," Li said. "Equipped with voice, facial expressions, and gestures, a digital human is more expressive and more trustworthy." Baidu Yijing is also taking its digital human capabilities global by launching an international edition that enables merchants and creators to easily generate digital human content, from e-commerce livestreams to digital human videos and beyond. Supporting the platform are three agent capabilities — script writing, video production, and intelligent editing — along with deep localization from the ground up. The platform supports 12 languages with native-level lip-sync accuracy and localized AI-powered content creation, helping merchants run round-the-clock digital human livestreams across multiple global markets.
Reflecting on the above products, Li described a fundamental shift in the basic unit of productive capacity: where it was once a team, it is now a super individual. In the agent era, every developer is simultaneously a builder, founder, and creator.
Famou Agent 2.0: Agent That Self-Verifies and Closes the Loop Can Evolve Without Limit
Baidu's self-evolving agent Famou was upgraded to version 2.0 at Create 2026. A self-evolving agent like Famou is designed to address complex operational challenges across industries and help enterprises unlock meaningful productivity gains. The 2.0 version expands direct accessibility to domain experts across three high-value use cases: production scheduling, process optimization, and logistics planning. Commenting on Famou, Li noted that agents capable of self-verification and closed-loop execution could shift efficiency gains from linear to exponential. At one of the world's most sophisticated automated ports, for instance, Famou Agent autonomously identifies optimal solutions across berth scheduling, equipment allocation, and cargo prioritization, delivering a 10.21% performance improvement on top of an already highly optimized baseline. Famou Agent 2.0 has topped MLE-Bench, winning 9 of the 15 hardest tasks and outperforming agents built on other leading models.
New Full-Stack AI Cloud: The Infrastructure Behind Agents at Scale
Underpinning these agent applications is a series of infrastructure upgrades announced at the same event. Baidu AI Cloud announced a comprehensive upgrade, repositioning itself as a new full-stack AI cloud purpose-built for large-scale agent applications, with upgrades spanning Agent Infra and AI Infra. A dedicated cluster powered by Baidu's proprietary Kunlunxin AI chip has supported the training of a key model in the ERNIE 5.1 series. Earlier in May, Baidu released ERNIE 5.1, its latest foundation model, which ranked #1 among Chinese models on LMArena's text and search leaderboards.
About Baidu
Founded in 2000, Baidu's mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under "BIDU" and HKEX under "9888." One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares.
** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
Baidu Advances Agent Portfolio to Embrace the Agent Era, Champions Daily Active Agents as Key Metric
