Cohere Raises $270M Series C to Empower Businesses with AI

Cohere, the provider of an AI development platform, announced it has raised $270 million in a Series C round.

“AI will be the heart that powers the next decade of business success,” said Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder, Cohere. “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.”

Cohere offers an enterprise-focused AI platform with several deployment options, as well as customization options and support from an ecosystem of consulting and system integrator partners. The company’s enterprise AI suite is cloud-agnostic and built to be available on every cloud provider, deployed inside customers’ existing cloud environment, virtual private cloud, or on-prem.

The latest Series C round was led by Inovia Capital with participation from a diverse range of investors including Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP, Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, SentinelOne, Thomvest Ventures, and returning investor Index Ventures.

The company says the funding will accelerate its leadership position in enabling enterprises to securely build AI applications on their chosen cloud platform.

Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere. (Source: Cohere)

“We are at the beginning of a new era driven by accelerated computing and generative AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “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.”

“Our entire raison d’être is to invest in great entrepreneurs who have great worldwide missions and ambitions,” said Steve Woods, CTO and partner, Inovia Capital. “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.”

Cohere was founded by Canadian researchers and Google alumni Gomez and Nick Frosst, and Toronto entrepreneur Ivan Zhang. Gomez was a member of the research team that published a paper detailing the Transformer architecture that became the basis for today’s LLMs.

Cohere’s recent trajectory is marked by a number of key developments. The company secured an investment from Salesforce Ventures as part of its $250 million generative AI fund. Cohere also launched a pilot program with conversational AI specialist LivePerson for developing custom LLMs. Additionally, Cohere’s Command model was ranked highly in accuracy over comparable models in Stanford’s latest HELM benchmark, an evaluation of LLMs.

“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,” said Lance Matthews, managing director, DTCP. “Our unique fund structure and relationships allow 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.”

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