Cohere's $500M Funding Followed by Layoffs: AI Startup's Strategic Shift

AI startup Cohere cuts staff after $500 million funding round

The layoffs at Cohere, which had about 400 employees according to the company, follow the completion of a $500 million funding round from investors including AMD, Salesforce, Oracle and Nvidia that valued the company at $5.5 billion -- more than doubling its valuation from last year. Cohere is still hiring for roles in areas such as customer operations, partnerships, revenue, sales, product design and modeling, according to its website. Founded by ex-Google AI researchers and backed by Nvidia, Cohere's business model has centered on generative AI for the enterprise rather than on consumer chatbots, which have been the talk of the tech industry since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. In June 2023, Cohere raised $270 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, with Salesforce and Oracle participating in the funding round. Company executives have also attended AI forums at the White House. "With our most recent round of financing in place, we have a clear vision for the future of Cohere, which has required some internal realignment," a representative for the company told CNBC in a statement. "We will continue to aggressively hire people as we work to offer companies the most accurate, secure and private multilingual AI solutions in the market." Fortune first reported on the job cuts. The generative AI field has exploded over the past year, with a record $29.1 billion invested across nearly 700 deals in 2023, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. It's become the buzziest phrase on corporate earnings calls quarter after quarter, and some form of the technology is automating tasks in just about every industry, from financial services and biomedical research to logistics, online travel and utilities. Some of Cohere's competitors in the AI arms race offer products for both consumers and businesses. OpenAI, for instance, launched ChatGPT Enterprise last August, and Anthropic opened up consumer access to its formerly business-only Claude chatbot last July. Cohere president and COO Martin Kon told CNBC in March that by staying focused just on the enterprise, the company is able to run efficiently and keep costs under control even amid a chip shortage, rising costs for graphics processing units (GPUs) and ever-changing licensing fees for AI models. Current clients include Notion, Oracle and Bamboo HR, according to Cohere's website. Many customers include businesses in banking, financial services and insurance, Kon told CNBC in the past. In November, Cohere told CNBC it saw an uptick in customer interest after OpenAI's sudden and temporary ouster of CEO Sam Altman. In March, Kon acknowledged that changing dynamics in the hardware industry have presented persistent challenges. The company has had a reserve of Google chips for well over two years, Kon said at the time, secured in Cohere's early days to help it pretrain its models. Now, Cohere is moving toward using more of Nvidia's H100 GPUs, which are powering most of the latest large language models.

Hours after raising $500 million, AI startup Cohere told staff it was laying off about 20 employees

The day after media headlines touted generative AI model startup Cohere's fresh $500 million in new funding at a $5 billion valuation, the company is laying off about 20 employees. The job cuts, equivalent to roughly 5% of the company's 400-person workforce, is the latest sign of the challenges surrounding the tech industry's headlong rush into generative AI, with bullish indicators and warning signs seeming to flash simultaneously. In a letter to employees on Tuesday viewed by Fortune, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said the layoffs were a "necessary step to ensure that we have the right people in place to remain highly competitive and at the forefront of the industry." Gomez said that this has been a "mixed week," with a successful funding round and an "exciting new roadmap" of new models. He added that the company will continue to hire at a fast pace, both backfilling for positions that are open (there are about 35 listed on Cohere's website) and adding capacity in areas identified as strategic priorities. "Overall, we anticipate that we are likely to double our overall headcount over the course of 2024-unchanged from before this decision -- reflecting the growth of the business." Cohere, which shared a copy of the letter in response to Fortune's request, would not comment on the severance being offered to employees affected by the layoffs and said that the roles affected varied, and were not concentrated on any specific job type. The Toronto-based startup is among OpenAI's top competitors, along with Google, Meta, Anthropic and Mistral, in the race to build the most capable large language models (LLMs) -- a high-cost endeavor that requires access to vast amounts of pricey and power-hungry computer chips. Investors have been piling into the AI sector. In May, ScaleAI and Coreweave each raised $1 billion. X.ai, founded by Elon Musk, raised $6 billion that same month. And Paris-based Mistral raised $640 million in June. On Monday, Cohere announced that it had raised $500 million in its Series D funding round, led by Canadian pension fund PSP Investments, as well as backers including AMD, Cisco, and others. Founded in 2019 by three alumni of Google Brain, Cohere has been under pressure recently to prove that its models and its go-to-market strategy can deliver world-class performance to businesses -- while at the same time raising enough money to pay for the computing power it needs and generating enough revenue to satisfy investors. As Fortune reported in April, the cost of training large LLMs is staggering and necessitates a constant stream of new funding. But in many ways, Cohere is running its own race. For one thing, it is targeting big business customers and has not developed a consumer chatbot. Cohere's rivals include Big Tech companies with their own cloud computing arms; startups closely partnered with them; or those giving open-source models away for others to build upon. Cohere, meanwhile, has sought to maintain its financial independence from any single cloud ecosystem (though it does have a partnership with Oracle, the fourth largest cloud provider). This has been a mixed week for all of us. With our successful funding round closed, and a very exciting roadmap of new models and greater impact, I've never been more optimistic about our future. At the same time, it is with sadness that we have taken the step part ways with some of our colleagues from the last several years. I'm extremely grateful for the contributions of all of you, as well those who are leaving the company. While painful, this was a necessary step to ensure that we have the right people in place to remain highly competitive and at the forefront of the industry. We will continue to hire at a fast pace, both backfilling for positions that are open, and adding capacity in new areas that we have identified as strategic priorities. Overall, we anticipate that we are likely to double our overall headcount over the course of 2024-unchanged from before this decision -- reflecting the growth of the business. Cohere is growing very quickly, and with that development comes growing pains, which is normal, if difficult at times. The good news is that we are set up for success, in terms of funding, strategic partnerships, industry-leading talent, and clear vision for the future of Cohere. Cohere's mission is to do whatever it takes to scale intelligence to serve humanity. To date, we have been pursuing that by building great models and serving them securely to our customers via channel partners. Going forward - while continuing our existing model-as-a-service business - we will begin to focus more and more on augmenting the workforce with AI and supporting sophisticated automation of tasks. I'm extremely excited to build that future with the team here today. It's been a busy year and hopefully everyone feels as optimistic as I do that we are best positioned to succeed over the next year, five years and ten years. Cohere is only just beginning and we have a tremendously bright future to go and build. Correction: Cohere announced its $500 million funding on Monday, not on Tuesday.

AI model developer startup Cohere raises $500M at $5.5B valuation - SiliconANGLE

Generative artificial intelligence model startup Cohere Inc. today announced it has raised $500 million in a late-stage funding round, bringing the company's valuation to $5.5 billion. The Series D funding round was led by PSP Investments, a Canadian pension investment manager, and new backers including Cisco Systems Inc., Japan's Fujitsu Ltd., chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s AMD Ventures and Canada's export credit agency EDC. Reuters previously reported on the deal, which doubles the company's valuation from $2.2 billion last year when the company raised $270 million from investors including Nvidia Inc. and Oracle Corp. This funding round brings the total raised by the company to $970 million. Cohere builds enterprise-focused AI large language models and stands as a rival to OpenAI and Google LLC, which also dominate the industry. There are very few startups in the industry in part due to how expensive and difficult it is to develop and deploy LLM foundation models. As a result, there are not a lot of experts and resources available to do the research and development needed to stay ahead. The company's approach has been to build practical foundation models that can be implemented by enterprise customers to support employees and automate business systems. Unlike other high-profile companies in the industry, which are pursuing "human-like" intelligence in the form of AI, Cohere aims to build AI for enterprise efficiency. Cohere's most recent AI model, Command R+, continues this vision by aiming to support real-world enterprise business workflows and use cases. The company's Command R family of models is designed to do generative AI business tasks, such as summarizing and analyzing text, but also have the capability of applying reasoning to automate software tools. This means that Command R+ can be commanded to complete multi-step tasks and it will combine and use available software to complete those tasks. The company's models are multilingual and cover 10 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Chinese. With the power of generative AI foundation models, customers can interface with software and data in ways that were never possible before. LLMs make it possible to "talk" to data, by holding human-like conversations, at the same time the model can understand intent and context from both data and users. This makes it much easier for a non-technical user to approach difficult tasks that might otherwise require expert knowledge to understand. Cohere's customers include a broad range of industries, which use its models to summarize, analyze and explain data from within finance, technology and retail. In some cases, its models are used in retail applications to recommend products and in banking applications to answer questions based on financial documents. The company recently partnered with Fujitsu to develop LLMs specifically tailored for enterprise use cases with Japanese language capabilities, tentatively named "Takane," based on Command R+. The joint partnership will lead to fine-tuned models for specialized model development and private cloud deployments for highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and government agencies.

Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals | TechCrunch

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. Bloomberg says that the round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada's export credit agency EDC, values Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion. That's more than double the startup's valuation from last June, when it secured $270 million from Inovia Capital and others, and brings Cohere's total raised to $970 million. Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere, told TechCrunch that the financing sets Cohere up for "accelerated growth." "[W]e continue to significantly expand our technical teams to build the next generations of accurate, data privacy-focused enterprise AI," Gartner said in a statement. "Cohere is laser-focused on leading the AI industry beyond esoteric benchmarks to deliver real-world benefits in the daily workflows of global businesses across regions and languages." Reuters reported in March that Cohere was seeking to nab between $500 million and $1 billion for its next round of fundraising, and that it was in talks with Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures to raise the money. Both Nvidia and Salesforce ended up contributing, Gartner confirmed in an email to TechCrunch. Aiden Gomez launched Cohere in 2019 along with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, with whom Gomez had done research at FOR.ai, a sort of progenitor to Cohere. Gomez is one of the co-authors of a 2017 technical paper, "Attention Is All You Need," that laid the foundation for many of the most capable generative AI models today, including OpenAI's GPT-4o and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and many of its generative AI startup rivals, Cohere doesn't have a big consumer focus. Instead, the company customizes its AI models, which perform tasks such as summarizing documents, writing website copy, and powering chatbots, for companies like Oracle, LivePerson and Notion. Cohere's AI platform is cloud agnostic, able to be deployed inside public clouds (e.g., Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services), a customer's existing cloud, virtual private clouds or on-site. The startup takes a hands-on approach, working with customers to create tailored models based on their proprietary data. Cohere also runs a nonprofit research lab, Cohere for AI, and releases open models like multilingual models for understanding and analyzing text. Its latest flagship model, Command R+, is designed to deliver many of the capabilities of more expensive models (e.g. GPT-4o) while costing less. Cohere's has proven to be a winning strategy -- even as both OpenAI and Anthropic ramp up their respective enterprise sales efforts. Bloomberg reports that, at the end of March, Cohere was generating $35 million in annualized revenue with a customer base of hundreds of companies, up from around $13 million at the end of 2023. Generative AI at Cohere's scale is a costly endeavor -- particularly as the company looks to train more sophisticated systems. The new tranche will surely help, as will Cohere's ongoing partnership with Google Cloud, wherein Google provides cloud infrastructure to train and run Cohere's models. Cohere also has close ties to Oracle, which is an investor as well as a customer; the startup's AI is built into many of Oracle's software products, including Oracle NetSuite. According to Bloomberg, Cohere is planning to double its 250-employee headcount this year.

AI start-up Cohere raises $500mn as it seeks to take on OpenAI

Artificial intelligence developer Cohere has raised $500mn in a new funding round, making it one of the world's most valuable start-ups in the field, boosting the Canadian company's efforts to take on rivals including OpenAI and Anthropic. The funding round values Cohere at $5.5bn. Founded by ex-Google researchers in 2019, it is in fierce competition with larger rivals to secure lucrative contracts with companies scrambling to build AI into their businesses. The capital was "going towards new models, [computing power] and headcount. It continues the momentum we have," said Josh Gartner, a spokesperson for Cohere. It plans to double its staff to about 500 this year. The funding came from a mixture of new and existing investors, including Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and Fujitsu. The Financial Times reported in January that Cohere was raising capital and targeting between $500mn-$1bn. Unlike larger rivals, Cohere has not developed an AI chatbot for consumers. Instead, it has courted enterprise customers for its AI models. Thanks to its narrower focus, Cohere's top-performing large language model is cheaper to build, train and run than those of its rivals. The company remains a fraction the size of OpenAI, which is valued at close to $90bn and has raised well over $10bn since 2019, and Anthropic, which raised more than $7bn in a funding frenzy between 2023 and this year. Anthropic was most recently valued at close to $20bn. Cohere's founders Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang are also taking on Google, which has developed its own suite of enterprise AI products. The company raised $270mn in June last year. Its return to investors after little more than a year underscores the aggressive pace of development in a sector that has become far more competitive since the landmark launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022. More than 18 months on, investors are increasingly keen to see evidence that their big bets will one day pay off. Many argue that recent AI breakthroughs amount to a technological "platform shift", but developing cutting-edge models is hugely costly, meaning start-ups must strike lucrative deals with Big Tech partners -- as OpenAI has done with Microsoft and Anthropic has done with Google and Amazon -- or quickly increase revenue. Cohere's revenues on an annualised basis hit $35mn in March, almost trebling from $13mn at the end of 2023, according to a person with knowledge of its growth.

LLM developer startup Cohere raises $500M at $5.5B valuation - SiliconANGLE

Generative artificial intelligence model startup Cohere Inc. today announced it raised $500 million in Series D funding, bringing the company's valuation to $5.5 billion. The funding round was led by PSP Investments, a Canadian pension investment manager, and new backers including Cisco Systems Inc., Japan's Fujitsu Ltd., chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s AMD Ventures and Canada's export credit agency EDC. Reuters previously reported on the deal, which doubles the company's valuation from $2.2 billion last year when the company raised $270 million from investors including Nvidia Inc. and Oracle Corp. This funding round brings the total raised by the company to $970 million. Cohere builds enterprise-focused AI large language models and stands as a rival to OpenAI and Google LLC, which also dominate the industry. There are very few startups in the industry in part due to how expensive and difficult it is to develop and deploy LLM foundation models. As a result, there are not a lot of experts and resources available to do the research and development needed to stay ahead. The company's approach has been to build practical foundation models that can be implemented by enterprise customers to support employees and automate business systems. Unlike other high-profile companies in the industry, which are pursuing "human-like" intelligence in the form of AI, Cohere aims to build AI for enterprise efficiency. Cohere's most recent AI model, Command R+, continues this vision by aiming to support real-world enterprise business workflows and use cases. The company's Command R family of models is designed to do generative AI business tasks, such as summarizing and analyzing text, but also have the capability of applying reasoning to automate software tools. This means that Command R+ can be commanded to complete multi-step tasks and it will combine and use available software to complete those tasks. The company's models are multilingual and cover 10 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Chinese. With the power of generative AI foundation models, customers can interface with software and data in ways that were never possible before. LLMs make it possible to "talk" to data, by holding human-like conversations, at the same time the model can understand intent and context from both data and users. This makes it much easier for a non-technical user to approach difficult tasks that might otherwise require expert knowledge to understand. Cohere's customers include a broad range of industries, which use its models to summarize, analyze and explain data from within finance, technology and retail. In some cases, its models are used in retail applications to recommend products and in banking applications to answer questions based on financial documents. The company recently partnered with Fujitsu to develop LLMs specifically tailored for enterprise use cases with Japanese language capabilities, tentatively named "Takane," based on Command R+. The joint partnership will lead to fine-tuned models for specialized model development and private cloud deployments for highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and government agencies.

AI startup Cohere sees valuation soar to $5.5B after new funding round

Canadian AI startup Cohere is now one of the world's most valuable AI companies following a new funding round, which valued the company at $5.5B, Bloomberg News reported. The company has raised $500M in a Series D funding. The investment was led by Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, and a syndicate of additional new investors including backers at Cisco Systems (CSCO), Japan's Fujitsu (OTCPK:FJTSF) (OTCPK:FJTSY), Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD) AMD Ventures and Canada's export credit agency EDC, the report added. Cohere builds large language models, or LLMs, and customizes them for businesses. Last month, it was reported that Nvidia (NVDA) and Salesforce (CRM) were part of a new funding round which valued the company at $5B, up from a reported $2.2B in June 2023. The new investment round brings Cohere total cash reserve to about $970M, according to the report. Cohere's product has seen interest from hundreds of customers such as Notion Labs and Oracle (ORCL), which is also an investor. Oracle uses Cohere's technology to help perform tasks like writing website copy, communicating with users and add generative AI to their own products. The start-up has customers across sectors, including banks, tech companies and retailers. Cohere competes with bigger rivals such as Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and Alphabet's (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google. Microsoft has a collaboration with France's Mistral, while Anthropic has seen funding from Amazon (AMZN), Google and Salesforce. In spring, Cohere unveiled its new model called Command R+, its most powerful LLM so far. The company said it is intended to compete against competitors such as OpenAI, while costing less, the report noted.

Enterprise AI startup Cohere raises $500M even as skepticism of sector grows

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Even as questions and criticism swirl around the return-on-investment of generative AI tools for enterprises, one specifically enterprise-focused AI startup, Cohere, from Toronto, Canada, has just today announced a fresh $500 million Series D fundraising round. That brings the company's total valuation to $5.5 billion, nowhere near the reported $90 billion of OpenAI, but a still significant sum that shows investor enthusiasm in the sector is not waning quite yet. Cohere's new fundraising, first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by the company, was led by the Canadian pension investment firm PSP Investments and a group of new investors, including Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, AMD's venture arm AMD Ventures, Magnetar, and Export Development Canada. Cohere head of communications Josh Gartner told VentureBeat that the Series D fundraising also had returning investors in Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and Nvidia. The news comes following additional investment in the sector for rivals" Anthropic raised $450 million in Series C financing this year, French AI company Mistral got a $640 million investment in June, and the search chatbot Perplexity became a unicorn after a $65 million investment. Continuous development of enterprise AI models, with focus on data privacy and security Gartner said the additional capital will support the continuous development of Cohere's models with a focus on data privacy and security, multilingual accuracy and capabilities like retrieval augmented generation (RAG), one of the leading themes to emerge from the VB Transform event in San Francisco earlier this month. Cohere has released two enterprise-focused large language models (LLMs), Command R and Command R+. At the time of the release of Command R+ earlier this year, it boasted metrics matching and in some cases outperforming other, more consumer-facing LLMs from rivals including Anthropic's Claude 3, OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo and Mistral's Mistral-Large. But since then, the commercial providers have all released new, more powerful LLMs or in the case of OpenAI, a more powerful GPT-4o and less powerful but far cheaper GPT-4o mini model, which explicitly courts enterprises such as the kind of customers Cohere caters to, showing the intensifying competition in the sector. While companies like OpenAI have released enterprise plans for their chatbots such as ChatGPT Enterprise while maintaining free versions for individual consumer use (ChatGPT), Cohere eschews the consumer market entirely in favor of enterprises. Last summer, it launched the enterprise AI assistant Coral, which aims to mitigate hallucinations and trains on internal data while offering data security. A preview version of Coral is available to consumers on Cohere's website, as well as a Chat API for third-party developers to build their own apps atop it.

Cohere Raises $500M At $5.5B Valuation

The round had been reported on for months, with a story from Reuters last month saying the AI startup was raising a $450 million investment from big-named corporate investors at a $5 billion valuation. The new round reportedly will be led by Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, and includes investment from Cisco, Fujitsu, AMD Ventures and Canada's export credit agency EDC. Another report said Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures 1 also participated. Cohere builds large language models that allow AI to learn from new data, and can be customized and put into applications for features such as interactive chat or to generate text. In June 2023, the company raised a $270 million Series C led by Inovia Capital at a valuation of $2.2 billion. Investors in the round included Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP and SentinelOne -- as well as financial institutions and VC firms Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Index Ventures. Founded in 2019, the company has raised nearly $935 million, per Crunchbase. While the new round for Cohere was no surprise, it also further illustrates the price investors are willing to pay to not be left out of the AI race. Those investors include a growing list of big-name corporations and their venture arms -- many related to the chip industry -- who want in on the ground floor of these generative AI startups. This year, AI investment is well ahead of even last year's breakneck pace, with AI-related startups having raised $39.4 billion, per Crunchbase. That far outpaces last year at this time, when less than $31 billion had been raised by similar startups.

AI startup Cohere valued at US$5.5 billion in new funding round

(Bloomberg) -- Artificial intelligence startup Cohere Inc. is now one of the world's most valuable artificial intelligence companies, and one of the largest startups in Canada -- but unlike some of its Silicon Valley competitors, it's not particularly flashy. In a new funding round, Cohere was valued at US$5.5 billion, vaulting it to the upper echelons of global startups. It landed there without a consumer app that writes poems, draws pictures or helps with homework. Instead, Toronto-based Cohere makes large language models -- software trained on massive swaths of the internet to analyze and generate text -- and customizes them for businesses. Its software has attracted hundreds of customers such as Notion Labs Inc. and Oracle Inc. (also an investor), which use the startup's technology to do things like help write website copy, communicate with users and add generative AI to their own products. Cohere has also attracted investors. The company has raised $500 million in a Series D funding, it plans to announce on Monday. The round was led by Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, alongside a syndicate of additional new backers including investors at Cisco Systems Inc., Japan's Fujitsu, chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s AMD Ventures and Canada's export credit agency EDC. The fresh financing more than doubles the startup's valuation from last year, when Cohere raised $270 million in a round led by Montreal-based Inovia Capital, and brings its total cash haul to $970 million. The round has also coincided with an increasingly competitive landscape for venture funding, even in the closely watched world of AI. Reuters previously reported some details of the deal. Cohere is one of only a handful of startups building massive large language models from scratch, partly because the technology is extremely expensive and difficult to construct. Competitors include the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. OpenAI in particular has said its goals are wildly ambitious -- attempting to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI, meaning AI software capable of performing as well as (or better than) humans at most tasks. Cohere is instead pursuing the immediately practical goal of making software to help companies run more efficiently. "We're not out there chasing AGI," said Nick Frosst, one of the company's three co-founders. "We're trying to make models that can be efficiently run in an enterprise to solve real problems." Started in 2019, Cohere is led by co-founder Aidan Gomez, who is a genuine celebrity in the world of artificial intelligence. Gomez is one of the authors of the seminal research paper "Attention Is All You Need," which led to advances in the ways computers analyze and generate text. Gomez, Frosst and co-founder Ivan Zhang, have built the company rapidly in the years since. This spring, they rolled out Cohere's new model, Command R+, the company's most powerful so far. Cohere says it's intended to compete against rivals like OpenAI, while costing less. At the end of March, Cohere was generating $35 million in annualized revenue, up from $13 million at the end of 2023, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not be identified because the information is private. The company, which started the year with roughly 250 employees, plans to double its headcount this year. The capabilities of large language models have changed quickly over the past four years, and public interest in chatbots that run on such software -- which can capably mimic human conversations -- skyrocketed since late 2022 with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Figuring out how to make the technology useful and staying ahead of the curve as it evolves has been a major effort for the company, Frosst said. Today, Cohere has customers across a wide range of industries. They include banks, tech companies and retailers. One luxury consumer brand is using a virtual shopping tool Cohere built to help workers suggest products to customers. Toronto-Dominion Bank, a new customer, will use Cohere's AI for tasks such as answering questions based on financial documents, Frosst said. "My favorite use cases of this technology are the are ones that power things that nobody wants to do," Frosst said. For example, a startup called Borderless AI uses Cohere's models to answer questions related to the intricacies of employment law around the world in multiple languages. Cohere's models can be used across 10 languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Japanese, and its models can cite sources in answers as well. Guillermo Freire, who heads the mid-market group at EDC, said the startup's ability to operate across many languages was one of the things that interested the Canadian government agency. Freire hopes EDC's investment will help the homegrown company expand internationally, but remain based in the country. Cohere has now grown to include offices in hubs like San Francisco and London, but says it doesn't plan to leave the city where it started. "Toronto's been a great place to build a global company," Frosst said.

Cohere Reaches $5.5 Billion Valuation in Latest Funding Round

The latest funding round, led by Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, has raised $500 million for Cohere. Toronto-based AI startup Cohere Inc has reached a valuation of $5.5 billion, solidifying its position as one of the world's most valuable AI companies and one of Canada's largest startups. The latest funding round, led by Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, has raised $500 million for Cohere. The Series D funding round, which also saw participation from Cisco Systems Inc., Japan's Fujitsu, AMD Ventures, and Canada's export credit agency EDC, more than doubles the company's valuation from the previous year. The fresh financing brings Cohere's total funding to $970 million. Cohere's competitor, OpenAI, is currently valued at $86 billion and the company made a revenue of $3.4 billion from its ChatGPT offerings.s. Founded in 2019, Cohere specialises in developing large language models (LLMs) designed for business applications. Unlike some of its high-profile Silicon Valley counterparts, such as OpenAI and Google, Cohere focuses on practical solutions to enhance business efficiency rather than pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company's models are used by clients like Notion Labs and Oracle to optimise tasks including website copywriting, user communication, and integration of generative AI. Cohere's new model, Command R+, launched this spring, is its most advanced offering to date. The company is also scaling rapidly, with annualised revenue growing from $13 million at the end of 2023 to $35 million by March 2024. It plans to double its workforce this year, having started 2024 with approximately 250 employees. Cohere recently announced a partnership with Fujitsu Limited to develop and offer large language models (LLMs) tailored for enterprises. The collaboration aims to leverage Japanese language capabilities to enhance customer and employee experiences. The partnership will see Fujitsu become the exclusive provider of these services globally through Fujitsu Data Intelligence The company's technology supports applications in over ten languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese. Notable use cases include a virtual shopping tool for a luxury brand and AI-powered financial document analysis for Toronto-Dominion Bank. Borderless AI leverages Cohere's models to address complex employment law queries in multiple languages. Cohere continues to operate from Toronto, despite its growth into international markets such as San Francisco and London. The company remains committed to its Canadian roots, with co-founder Nick Frosst highlighting Toronto's role as a strategic hub for global expansion.

Cohere 'Not Chasing AGI' as AI Startup's Value Hits $5 Billion

As Bloomberg News reported Monday (July 22), this $500 million round brings Cohere's total funding to $970 million. According to the report, Canada-based Cohere is the rare artificial intelligence (AI) startup creating massive large language models from scratch, partly because the technology is extremely expensive and difficult to build. And while rivals such as OpenAI and Google are trying to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI, or AI software that can perform tasks at or above the level of humans, Cohere is instead focused on more practical goals, Co-founder Nick Frosst told Bloomberg. "We're not out there chasing AGI," he said. "We're trying to make models that can be efficiently run in an enterprise to solve real problems." The company, Bloomberg notes, has clients from an array of industries, including retailers, tech companies and banks. For example, Toronto-Dominion Bank, a new customer, plans to use Cohere's AI for tasks like answering questions based on financial documents. "My favorite use cases of this technology are the ones that power things that nobody wants to do," Frosst said. That means things like the startup Borderless AI using Cohere's models to answer questions on employment law around the world in multiple languages. Meanwhile, recent research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that most large companies are struggling to deploy AI in meaningful ways, lagging the race to leverage AI. The findings in "The Impact of GenAI on a COO's Priorities," the third edition of PYMNTS Intelligence's "2024 CAIO Project," present a sobering reality check for the AI revolution. The report, based on surveys of chief operating officers from companies with at least $1 billion in yearly revenue, uncovers a major gap between the perceived potential of generative AI and how it is now being applied in the corporate world. The research showed that 70% of those COOs agreed that GenAI is a critical part of strategic planning. Still, there is a gap between aspiration and reality. "This disconnect between vision and execution is particularly striking, given AI's high-profile nature in today's business landscape," PYMNTS wrote last week. "With tech giants and startups alike touting its transformative power, many had expected to see more rapid and widespread adoption of advanced AI applications in large enterprises."

Nvidia-Backed AI Startup Cohere's Valuation Soars To $5.5B: Report - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Cohere focuses on business applications of large language models. Nvidia Corp NVDA backed AI startup Cohere Inc., has reportedly emerged as one of the most valuable AI companies globally, with a valuation of $5.5 billion at a recent funding round, making it one of Canada's largest startups. Unlike its Silicon Valley counterparts, Cohere focuses on creating large language models for businesses rather than consumer-facing apps. The startup raised $500 million in a Series D funding round led by PSP Investments. New backers include Cisco Systems Inc CSCO, Fujitsu, AMD Ventures, and Canada's export credit agency EDC, reported Bloomberg. This new funding more than doubles Cohere's valuation from the previous year and brings its total funding to $970 million. Last valued at $2.2 billion in June, when it raised $270 million, Cohere's sought-after valuation has surged. Cohere is known for developing massive large language models, a field dominated by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet Inc's GOOGL GOOG Google. The startup's practical approach aims to improve business efficiencies rather than pursuing ambitious goals like artificial general intelligence. Also Read: Google And Microsoft Provide Nvidia Chip Access To Chinese Firms Despite U.S. Restrictions: Report Cohere recently launched its most powerful model, Command R+, designed to compete with rivals like OpenAI at a lower cost. As of March, Cohere reported $35 million in annualized revenue and plans to double its headcount from 250 employees. The company supports a wide range of industries, including banks, tech firms, and retailers, with its models being used across 10 languages. Nvidia, which has become the posterchild of the AI revolution, is not only catering to the rising demand for its advanced chips but has also become a venture capital investor in firms leveraging the technology. The chip major has reportedly invested in about three dozen startups, with investments in other companies rising sharply from $300 million a year ago to $1.55 billion at end-January. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Image via Shutterstock Read Next: Nvidia Reportedly Developing A New Version Of Its Flagship AI Chip For Chinese Market Amid US Export Restrictions Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs