On Thursday, it was disclosed by Cohere that it secured $500 million in an oversubscribed round, and that Cohere has raised its market value up to $6.8 billion. This is considerably higher compared to the $5.5 billion value the company received when it raised $500 million in the previous round of financing a little over twelve months ago.
Aidan Gomez, founded Cohere in 2019. Gomez also participated in writing of the paper “Attention Is All You Need,” that served as the basis for contemporary artificial intelligence. Cohere is one of the first breakthrough LLM model makers. In the last few AI model battles, that were dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, as well as Meta, it has been a sleeper entrant. However, it has always offered secure LLMs designed for company usage rather than for individual consumers.
In order to achieve this, it has partnered with some of the largest brands in business technology, including as SAP, Dell, Bell, Fujitsu, Oracle, and LG’s consulting firm CNS. It has also partnered with RBC and Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, a new investor in this round. For example, Cohere “represents a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models,” according to its news release.
However, Cohere is not immune to the AI talent-poaching craze that has gripped the other AI businesses, as TechCrunch noted. Joelle Pineau, who have been leading Meta research for a long period of time, was recently hired as its chief AI officer. A former consultant at KPMG, Francois Chadwick was also hired as a new CFO. He served as CFO at Shield AI and in finance at Uber.
Inovia Capital along with Radical Ventures are leading the latest round. Radical has supported brands including Hebbia and Writer, as well as businesses like Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. A well-known Canadian venture capital business, Inovia has projects including Poolside and Neo4j.
Existing investors AMD Ventures, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures participated in the round; however, it’s interesting to note that the business did not identify Oracle as an ongoing participating investment. Although Oracle supported Cohere in 2023, the database behemoth has more recently aligned itself with OpenAI, especially as part of the Stargate project, a large data center construction project.
