Cohere Secures $500 Million In Funding To Challenge Generative AI Competitors

Cohere, a generative AI startup founded by former Google researchers, has secured $500 million in funding from major investors including Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu. This latest round of investment, which also saw participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, values the Toronto-based company at $5.5 billion. This is more than double Cohere's valuation from June 2023 when it raised $270 million from Inovia Capital and other investors, bringing its total funding to $970 million.

Josh Gartner, Cohere's head of communications, stated that the new funding would facilitate "accelerated growth" for the company. "We continue to expand our technical teams to build the next generations of accurate, data privacy-focused enterprise AI," Gartner said. "Cohere is laser-focused on leading the AI industry beyond esoteric benchmarks to deliver real-world benefits in the daily workflows of global businesses across regions and languages."

Cohere, which was founded in 2019 by Aiden Gomez, Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang, focuses on customizing AI models for enterprise clients such as Oracle, LivePerson, and Notion. Unlike its competitors OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral, Cohere does not have a significant consumer focus. Instead, it offers AI models that perform tasks like summarizing documents, writing website copy, and powering chatbots.

The company's AI platform is cloud-agnostic and can be deployed across various environments, including public clouds such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, a customer's cloud, virtual private clouds, or on-premises. Cohere collaborates intimately with clients to develop customized models utilizing their unique data. Furthermore, Cohere operates a nonprofit research laboratory, Cohere for AI, which publishes open-access models, including multilingual models for text comprehension and analysis.

Operating generative AI at Cohere's level is a costly venture, especially as the company aims to develop more advanced systems. The recent funding will bolster these initiatives, in addition to supporting Cohere's continuous partnership with Google Cloud, which supplies the cloud infrastructure needed for training and deploying Cohere's models. Moreover, Cohere sustains a strong relationship with Oracle, serving both as an investor and a client, integrating its AI into numerous Oracle software offerings, such as Oracle NetSuite.