Cohere – a leading pioneer in language AI – is a company that empowers every developer and business to build incredible products with world-leading natural language processing (NLP) technology while keeping their data private and secure. Recently the company announced it raised $270 million as part of a Series C round of funding. According to TechCrunch, this funding round was based on a valuation of somewhere between $2.1 billion and $2.2 billion.
Inovia Capital led the round with additional participation from a diverse group of global institutional and strategic investors, including NVIDIA, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP, Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, SentinelOne, Thomvest Ventures, and returning investor Index Ventures. And this group represents investors from the USA, Canada, Korea, the UK, and Germany, and includes some of the most respected technology companies in the world.
Cohere was co-founded by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst. Frosst was one of the first employees at Google’s Toronto-based AI lab. Gomez is known for publishing papers about advanced large language models (LLMs). And Zhang has experience at companies like FOR.ai, Cortex Labs, and Pressly.
Cohere’s AI platform was built to be cloud agnostic and it can be deployed in various public clouds, virtual private clouds, or on-premise. And the company has been seeing high demand from enterprises.
The company currently has about 180 employees and it has raised about $445 million.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI will be the heart that powers the next decade of business success. As the early excitement about generative AI shifts toward ways to accelerate businesses, companies are looking to Cohere to position them for success in a new era of technology. The next phase of AI products and services will revolutionize business, and we are ready to lead the way.”
— Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder
“We are at the beginning of a new era driven by accelerated computing and generative AI. The team at Cohere has made foundational contributions to generative AI. Their service will help enterprises around the world harness these capabilities to automate and accelerate.”
— Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA
“Our entire raison d’être is to invest in great entrepreneurs who have great worldwide mission and ambitions. Very few ideas can fundamentally change society and add more value to humankind. This is obviously one such opportunity and we are thrilled to partner with Cohere to be a part of it.”
— Steve Woods, CTO and Partner, Inovia Capital
“Cohere has a rare combination of top-tier talent, the most innovative technology and is best positioned to seize the global enterprise market opportunity for Generative AI and LLMs. Our unique fund structure and relationships allows us to gather a coalition of global institutional and strategic investors including Deutsche Telekom to accelerate Cohere’s vision to bring this technology to enterprises worldwide.”
— Lance Matthews, Managing Director, DTCP
