Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by former Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new funding from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu.
The round, which also included participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada's export credit agency EDC, values Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. That's more than double the startup's valuation in June 2023 when it secured $270 million from Innovia Capital and others, and brings Cohere's total funding to $970 million.
Josh Gartner, Cohere's head of communications, told TechCrunch that the funding will allow Cohere to “accelerate its growth.”[W]”We continue to significantly expand our technical team to build the next generation of accurate, data privacy-focused enterprise AI,” Gartner said in a statement. “Cohere is focused on leading the AI industry beyond challenging benchmarks to deliver real-world benefits to the day-to-day operations of global enterprises across geographies and languages.”
Cohere is seeking to raise between $500 million and $1 billion in its next funding round and is in talks with Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures to raise the capital, according to Reuters. Both Nvidia and Salesforce ultimately contributed funding, Gartner confirmed to TechCrunch in an email.
Aiden Gomez co-founded Cohere in 2019 with his fellow researchers at FOR.ai, Nick Frost and Ivan Zhang. FOR.ai is one of the original founders of Cohere. Gomez was one of the co-authors of the 2017 technical paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which laid the foundation for many of today's most capable generative AI models, including OpenAI's GPT-4o and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion.
Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and many of its generative AI startup rivals, Cohere isn't so much focused on consumers. Instead, the company customizes AI models for companies like Oracle, LivePerson and Notion to perform tasks like summarizing documents, writing website copy and powering chatbots.
Cohere's AI platform is cloud agnostic and can be deployed on public clouds (e.g. Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services), customers' existing clouds, virtual private clouds, or on-site. The startup has a hands-on approach, working with customers to create customized models based on their own data.
Cohere also runs a nonprofit research lab, Cohere for AI, which releases open models, including a multilingual model for text understanding and analysis. The company's latest flagship model, Command R+, is designed to achieve many of the capabilities of more expensive models (such as GPT-4o) at a lower cost.
Cohere's strategy is proving successful, even as both OpenAI and Anthropic ramp up their respective enterprise sales efforts: As of the end of March, Cohere had a customer base of hundreds of companies and $35 million in annual revenue, up from about $13 million at the end of 2023, according to Bloomberg.
Doing generative AI at Cohere's scale is a costly endeavor, especially as the company seeks to train more sophisticated systems. The new funding will certainly help, as will Cohere's current partnership with Google Cloud, which provides the cloud infrastructure to train and run Cohere's models. Cohere also has close ties to Oracle, which is both a customer and an investor; the startup's AI is embedded in many of Oracle's software products, including Oracle NetSuite.
According to Bloomberg, Cohere plans to double its workforce to 250 this year.