Cohere

Last updated
Cohere Inc.
Company type Private
Industry
Founded2019;6 years ago (2019)
Founders Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst
Headquarters
Key people
  • Aidan Gomez (CEO)
  • Martin Kon (president & COO)
  • Jaron Waldman (CPO)
Number of employees
300 (2024) [1]
Website cohere.com

Cohere Inc. is a Canadian multinational technology company focused on artificial intelligence for the enterprise, specializing in large language models. [2] Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, [3] and is headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, with offices in Palo Alto, London, and New York City. [4] [5] [6]

Contents

History

In 2017, a team of researchers at Google Brain introduced the transformer machine learning architecture in "Attention Is All You Need," which demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. [7] [8] In 2019, Aidan Gomez, one of its co-authors, along with Nick Frosst, another researcher at Google Brain, founded Cohere with Ivan Zhang, with whom Gomez had done research at FOR.ai. [9] [10] All of the co-founders attended University of Toronto. [11]

Gomez is the company's CEO. [10] In December 2022, Martin Kon, the former CFO of YouTube, became president and COO. [12]

In November 2021, Google Cloud announced that they would help power Cohere's platform using their robust infrastructure, and Cloud's TPUs would be used by Cohere for the development and deployment of their products. [13] [14]

In June 2022, Cohere launched Cohere For AI, a nonprofit research lab and community dedicated to contributing open-source, fundamental machine learning research. It is led by Sara Hooker, a former research scientist at Google Brain. [15]

In December 2022, Cohere released a multilingual model for understanding text that would work with over 100 languages, to help users search for documents by meaning instead of with keywords. This type of process was not previously widely available in languages other than English. [12]

On June 13, 2023, Oracle announced a partnership with Cohere to provide generative AI services to help organizations automate end-to-end business processes. As a result, Cohere's technology is integrated into Oracle's business applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud, Oracle NetSuite, and Oracle industry-specific applications. [16] On July 18, 2023, McKinsey announced a collaboration with Cohere, to help organizations integrate generative AI into their operations. [17] In 2023, Cohere collaborated with software company LivePerson to offer customized large language models for businesses. [2]

On September 12, 2023, it was announced that Cohere had become one of 15 tech companies to agree to voluntary White House measures on testing, reporting, and research on the risks of AI. [18] On September 27, 2023, it was announced that Cohere had also signed Canada's voluntary code of conduct for AI, to promote the responsible development and management of advanced generative AI systems. [19]

Products

Considered an alternative to OpenAI, [20] Cohere is focused on generative AI for the enterprise, building technology that businesses can use to deploy chatbots, search engines, copywriting, summarization, and other AI-driven products. [2] [21] Cohere specializes in large language models: AI trained to digest text from an enterprises' internal data or publicly available sources like the internet to understand how to process and respond to prompts with increasing sophistication. [12]

The Cohere platform is available through API as a managed service, through platforms such as Amazon SageMaker and Google's Vertex AI. It can be used for tasks such as writing copy, moderating content, classifying data, and extracting information. It is cloud agnostic and not tied to a particular cloud service. [10]

Cohere's generative AI technology is embedded into several Oracle products, and its chat capabilities are embedded into Salesforce products. [20]

Launched in January 2025 in partnership with RBC, North for Banking is a secure generative AI platform designed to enhance productivity and data security in financial services. [22]

Funding

On September 7, 2021, Cohere announced that they had raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures; Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi also joined Cohere's board. [13] [14] The round also included Radical Ventures, Section 32, and AI-experts Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel, and Raquel Urtasun. [3]

In February 2022, Cohere announced they had raised $125 million in series B funding led by Tiger Global. [23] In June 2023, Cohere raised an additional $270 million in series C funding from investors including Inovia Capital, Oracle, Salesforce, and Nvidia, at a valuation of $2.2 billion. [2] [24]

In March 2024, it was reported that Cohere had an annualized revenue run rate of $22 million and in July 2024 it was reported they closed $500 million in funding from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu at a valuation of $5.5 billion. [25] [26]

In December 2024, Cohere received $240 million in public funding from the Canadian government as part of the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy to support the construction of a domestic AI data center. [27]

See also

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References

  1. ↑ Bratton, Laura (March 1, 2024). "Canada's leading AI startup is taking its talents to New York". Quartz.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Goldberg, Natalie (8 June 2023). "Nvidia invests in Google-linked generative A.I. startup Cohere". CNBC. Retrieved 6 October 2023.
  3. 1 2 Silcoff, Sean (2021-09-07). "Toronto AI startup Cohere raises US$40-million as it looks to bring Google-quality predictive language to masses". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  4. ↑ Hu, Krystal (March 1, 2024). ""AI startup Cohere opens New York office in expansion"". Reuters. Archived from the original on May 14, 2024. Retrieved May 26, 2024.
  5. ↑ Rai, Saritha (13 September 2023). "AI Startup Cohere Opens Second Headquarters in San Francisco". Bloomberg. Retrieved 3 October 2023.
  6. ↑ "Cohere". read.cv. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  7. ↑ "Cohere raises $40 million USD to make natural language processing more accessible | BetaKit". 2021-09-08. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  8. ↑ Sullivan, Mark (2021-09-07). "Ex-Googlers raise $40 million to democratize natural-language AI". Fast Company. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  9. ↑ "Cracking the code: This group of U of T computer science researchers are decoding ciphers with AI". University of Toronto News. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  10. 1 2 3 Goldman, Sharon (9 February 2023). "OpenAI rival Cohere AI has flown under the radar. That may be about to change". Venture Beat. Retrieved 3 October 2023.
  11. ↑ "AI startup Cohere raises US$40-million for natural language software: Globe and Mail". University of Toronto News. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  12. 1 2 3 O'Kane, Josh (14 December 2022). "Rising AI startup Cohere hires YouTube CFO Martin Kon as president". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 3 October 2023.
  13. 1 2 "Google Cloud teams up with NLP startup Cohere on multiyear partnership around TPUs". TechCrunch. 17 November 2021. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  14. 1 2 Cohere (2021-09-07). "Cohere Raises $40 Million in Series A Financing to Make Natural Language Processing Safe and Accessible to Any Business". GlobeNewswire News Room (Press release). Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  15. ↑ Goldman, Sharon (14 June 2022). "Google Brain alum to helm new nonprofit AI research lab". Venture Beat. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  16. ↑ Ajao, Esther (13 June 2023). "Oracle plans to provide generative AI services with Cohere". Tech Target. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  17. ↑ Franzen, Carl (18 July 2023). "Cohere is teaming up with McKinsey to bring AI to enterprise clients". Venture Beat. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  18. ↑ Ordonez, Franco (12 September 2023). "These tech giants are at the White House today to talk about the risks of AI". NPR. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  19. ↑ Masse, Bryson (27 September 2023). "Canada wants to be the first country to implement AI regulations: Minister of Innovation". Venture Beat. Retrieved 9 October 2023.
  20. 1 2 Bort, Julie (13 June 2023). "Oracle is betting its AI future on a company called Cohere. Here's why this little-known startup is becoming OpenAI's chief rival". Business Insider. Retrieved 10 October 2023.
  21. ↑ Metz, Cade (2 May 2023). "Generative A.I. Start-Up Cohere Valued at About $2 Billion in Funding Round". New York Times. Retrieved 10 October 2023.
  22. ↑ RBC. "RBC and Cohere partner to develop the next generation of highly secure generative AI solutions for financial services". www.newswire.ca. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  23. ↑ Silcoff, Sean (15 February 2022). "Toronto AI star Cohere raises US$125-million led by Tiger Global". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 6 October 2023.
  24. ↑ Baker, Liana (30 August 2023). "OpenAI Rival Cohere Taps JPMorgan, Goldman for Financing". Bloomberg. Retrieved 6 October 2023.
  25. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (2024-07-22). "Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-08-26.
  26. ↑ Hu, Krystal (March 1, 2024). ""AI startup Cohere opens New York office in expansion"". Reuters.
  27. ↑ Canada, Department of Finance (2024-12-06). "Deputy Prime Minister announces $240 million for Cohere to scale-up AI compute capacity". www.canada.ca. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
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