Cohere on Thursday announced that it had raised an oversubscribed $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. This is up from the $5.5 billion valuation it landed a little over a year ago when it raised its previous round, also $500 million.
Toronto-headquartered Cohere was one of the first breakout LLM model makers, founded in 2019 by co-founder Aidan Gomez, one of the authors of the “Attention Is All You Need” paper that became the foundation of modern AI. But it has been a sleeper entrant in the AI model wars of late, dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Its market proposition, however, has always been to offer secure LLMs specifically geared for enterprise use, not for consumers.
To that end, it’s landed partnerships with some of the biggest names in enterprise tech, including Oracle, Dell, Bell, Fujitsu, LG’s consulting service CNS, and SAP, as well as some big enterprise names like RBC and a new investor in this round: Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan.
Its press release even includes a jibe, stating that Cohere “represents a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models.”
Still, as TechCrunch reported, Cohere is not above the AI talent-poaching frenzy that has engulfed the other AI companies. It just nabbed long-time Meta research head Joelle Pineau to be its chief AI officer. It also hired a new CFO, Francois Chadwick, away from his consulting gig at KPMG. He had worked in finance at Uber and as CFO at Shield AI.
The new round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. Radical has backed companies like Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, as well as names like Hebbia and Writer. Inovia is a known Canadian venture firm (e.g., portfolio includes Poolside, Neo4j).
The round included participation from existing investors, including AMD Ventures, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures, although, interestingly enough, the company did not name Oracle as an ongoing participating investor. (We’ve asked Cohere about this.)
Oracle backed Cohere in 2023, but the database giant has more recently tied its fortunes more closely to OpenAI, particularly as part of the massive data center building project known as Stargate.
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