Cohere, headquartered in Toronto, announced an oversubscribed $500 million funding round on Thursday, increasing its valuation to $6.8 billion from $5.5 billion a little over a year ago. The company, founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, a co-author of the foundational “Attention Is All You Need” paper, specializes in providing secure large language models (LLMs) for enterprise applications rather than consumer use.
Cohere has established partnerships with prominent enterprise technology entities. These collaborations include agreements with Oracle, Dell, Bell, Fujitsu, LG’s consulting service CNS, and SAP. Additionally, Cohere has secured enterprise clients such as RBC, and Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan participated as a new investor in the latest funding round. Cohere’s public statements emphasize its focus on security, noting that it “represents a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models.”
The company has also made significant executive hires. Joelle Pineau, formerly the research head at Meta, has joined Cohere as its chief AI officer. Francois Chadwick, who previously served as a consultant at KPMG, and held finance roles at Uber and as CFO at Shield AI, has been appointed as Cohere’s new chief financial officer.
The recent funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. Radical Ventures has invested in companies such as Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, Hebbia, and Writer. Inovia Capital, a Canadian venture firm, lists Poolside and Neo4j among its portfolio companies. Existing investors, including AMD Ventures, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures, also participated in this latest round.
Oracle, which invested in Cohere in 2023, was not listed among the participants in the current funding round. Oracle has recently deepened its collaboration with OpenAI, particularly concerning the data center building initiative known as Stargate.
