Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm Cohere has bagged $500 million in a new funding round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion.
With backing from Nvidia, Cisco, Fujitsu, and others, Cohere intends to leverage the funds to expand teams and enhance its enterprise-grade offerings.
According to Bloomberg , Cohere has raised $500 million in a Series D funding round, pushing the firm’s valuation to a whopping $5.5 billion, placing it amongst the most valuable AI firms in the world.
Led by Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, Cohere also secured backing from Cisco, AMD, and Fujistsu.
Cohere sought to raise somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion in this round, which was reported to also include contributions from Nvidia. The firm is still in talks to raise more in the same round.
Founded in 2019, Cohere specializes in developing enterprise AI models for complex business challenges. Following this funding, it is becoming a major contender in the AI market.
But Cohere isn’t exactly a direct competitor to OpenAI or Anthropic as it lacks a consumer focus. It’s not interested in pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) but instead prefers to focus on large language models (LLMs) that specifically provide solutions for enterprises.
More specifically, clients including Notion Labs and Oracle leverage Cohere tech for powering chatbots, writing web copy, summarizing documents, and many other tasks.
Its AI platform is deployable within public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, as well as existing/virtual/onsite private clouds.
The firm also operates a nonprofit research lab, Cohere for AI, which sees its research group and lab working and supporting open science initiatives. This includes developing and releasing new language models, and auditing translation data.
At the end of March, Cohere was reported to have hundreds of companies signed up as clients, generating some $35 million in annual revenue. This is up from approximately $13 million in Q4 2023.
With plans to double its 250-strong workforce in 2024, Cohere has offices in Toronto and San Fransico, with significant offices in both London and New York.