Cohere, an AI model ecosystem developer for enterprises, raised $270 million in its Series C investment today.
Reuters reported earlier this year that Cohere was in talks to raise “hundreds of millions” at a valuation of over $6 billion. According to TechCrunch, this tranche puts Cohere at between $2.1 billion and $2.2 billion, implying that Cohere missed the valuation mark.
“The new capital will fuel continued development of Cohere’s AI platform, which is focused on enterprise customers, allowing companies to use their preferred cloud provider to increase data privacy and simplify implementation,” president and COO Martin Kon emailed TechCrunch. “The latest round allows us to invest in compute, grow our team, engage with more of the world’s leading enterprises, and further advance our world-leading AI, empowering companies to build incredible products while keeping their data private and secure.”
In 2019, Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Google’s Toronto AI lab’s first employee, Nick Frosst, established Cohere. Gomez co-authored “Attention Is All You Need,” which revealed the Transformer architecture of popular large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI’s GPT-4, before founding Cohere.
Kon joins in early 2023 after leaving YouTube as CFO. Cohere, which has produced multilingual language models trained on native speaker data and other AI, focuses on enterprise use cases to distinguish out in the sea of generative AI firms.
Cohere’s AI platform can be installed in public clouds (Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services), customer clouds, virtual private clouds, or on-site. The startup collaborates with customers to construct unique LLMs using their data.
“Cohere was founded to create a platform that empowers all enterprises to transform their company and products with world-leading AI that’s cloud-agnostic, accessible, customizable, and data-secure,” Kon added. We want enterprises globally to use this transformative technology.
Cohere conceals client numbers. The business uses Jasper and HyperWrite to authorize duties like marketing text, emails, and product descriptions. Cohere recently partnered with LivePerson, a conversational marketing company, to create explainable LLMs. The business works with news outlets, Salesforce Ventures, and others to use machine learning algorithms to break down, evaluate, and summarize long texts. Kon said huge firms are demanding both customers and partners.
Even by generative AI company norms, 180-person Cohere has raised $445 million. Inflection AI ($225 million) and Adept ($415 million) trail OpenAI ($11.3 billion) and Anthropic ($450 million). Training AI models requires capital. Anthropic aims to raise billions more to train its next task-accomplishing, AI.
“AI, building and training language models requires a lot of capital, but we’re mindful and intentional about what we need and committed to securing funds to ensure we can continue providing the best possible solution for our customers,” Kon added. “We’ve been intentional about maintaining a diversity of global investors and not taking one bigger check from one company—especially a cloud provider—because that may limit our ability to remain independent, service enterprises directly, remain cloud-agnostic and deploy data-secure solutions on any cloud according to our customers’ preference.”
That cloud provider investment comment was likely a jab at Microsoft and Google-backed businesses like OpenAI and Anthropic. However, Cohere was recently in advanced talks with Google regarding a $200 million investment.
Kon views “search and retrieval” as Cohere’s next development sector regardless of capital. Kon believes Cohere can construct more powerful AI systems using OpenAI’s methodologies to allow models or chatbots to grow their knowledge base and search the web for relevant information.
Chatbots cannot reach the globe today. Ten minutes ago is unknown to them. “They have to memorize everything within themselves and only remember what they saw during training,” Kon added. “With search and retrieval, you can require a model to cite sources, so users don’t need to blindly trust a model; everything links out to a site you can verify and fact check.”
Cohere intends to construct models to book flights, schedule meetings, and complete customer expense reports. Thus, it competes with Adept, Inflection, and OpenAI, which build solutions to connect AI to third-party apps, services, and products.
Kon claims Cohere is strong despite competition.
“We’re the independent, cloud-agnostic AI platform for enterprises,” he stated. “We solely focus on enabling our customers to create proprietary LLM capabilities leveraging their data and creating strategic differentiation and business value.”
Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP, Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, SentinelOne, Thomvest Ventures, Index Ventures, and Inovia Capital led the oversubscribed Series C investment.
