Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million from investors including Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu. The new funding round also saw participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, valuing the Toronto-based company at $5.5 billion. This is more than double Cohere’s valuation from June 2023 when it secured $270 million from Inovia Capital and others, bringing Cohere’s total funding to $970 million.
Significant Expansion and Growth
Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere, stated that this financing sets the company up for “accelerated growth.” “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 was aiming to raise between $500 million and $1 billion and was in talks with Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures to achieve this. Both companies contributed to the funding round, Gartner confirmed.
Funding History of Cohere
| Date | Amount Raised | Valuation | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2023 | $270 million | Not specified | Inovia Capital, others |
| July 2024 | $500 million | $5.5 billion | Cisco, AMD, Fujitsu, PSP, EDC |
Aiden Gomez launched Cohere in 2019 along with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang. Unlike other generative AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, Cohere focuses on customizing AI models for businesses rather than consumers. Their AI performs tasks such as summarizing documents, writing website copy, and powering chatbots for companies like Oracle, LivePerson, and Notion.
Cohere’s AI platform is cloud agnostic, deployable inside public clouds like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, a customer’s existing cloud, virtual private clouds, or onsite. The startup works closely with customers to create tailored models based on their proprietary data.
Cohere also runs a nonprofit research lab, Cohere for AI, and releases open models for text analysis. Its latest model, Command R+, offers capabilities similar to more expensive models like GPT-4 but at a lower cost.
At the end of March, Cohere was generating $35 million in annualized revenue with hundreds of customers, up from $13 million at the end of 2023. The new funding will help Cohere as it trains more sophisticated systems and continues its partnership with Google Cloud, which provides infrastructure to train and run Cohere’s models. Cohere also has ties to Oracle, which is both an investor and a customer, with its AI built into many Oracle products.
Bloomberg reports that Cohere plans to double its 250-employee headcount this year.
Featured Image courtesy of Reuters
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