Founded: 2019[Text Wrapping Break]Founders: Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst[Text Wrapping Break]Headquarters: Toronto, Canada & San Francisco, California[Text Wrapping Break]Funding: Cohere has raised nearly $970 million, including a $270M Series C and $500M Series D at a $5.5B valuation, with plans to raise over $500M more.
Overview:[Text Wrapping Break]Cohere is a foundation-model AI company focused on delivering customizable, secure large language models (LLMs) for enterprises. The company emphasizes cloud-agnostic deployment and privacy-conscious solutions, serving regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and government.
Mission:[Text Wrapping Break]To empower enterprises with tailored, high-performance AI through foundation models that prioritize data security and practical utility over general consumer appeal.
What Cohere Does:
- Develops enterprise-grade LLMs (e.g., Command R/R+, Command A, Aya Vision) reuters.com +1washingtonpost.com+1moneycontrol.com +5en.wikipedia.org
- Offers North, a ChatGPT-style tool launched in January 2025 for knowledge workers, currently piloted at RBC & LG reuters.com
- Runs Cohere for AI (nonprofit research arm), focused on model efficiency and open-source multilingual research (Aya)
Key Focus Areas:
- Foundation LLMs for enterprise applications
- Enterprise-grade AI deployments (cloud-agnostic, private/cloud/VPC)
- Model efficiency, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multimodal AI
- Open-source research, multilingual and vision capabilities
- Secure AI for regulated sectors
Use Cases:
- Document summarization, data classification, content generation
- Chatbots and virtual assistants integrated into enterprise workflows
- Knowledge worker productivity tools (via North)
- Vision-language applications with Aya Vision
- Custom LLM deployments for finance, telecom, and other regulated industries
Why Cohere Stands Out:
- Enterprise-centric: ~85% of revenue comes from private deployments with ~80% profit margins.
- Strong financials: Annualized revenue crossed $100 M by May 2025.
- Financial backing: Over $900 M raised from Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, Inovia, PSP Investments, Fujitsu, AMD, Salesforce Ventures, and government funders
- Founding pedigree: Built by ex-Google Brain researchers like Aidan Gomez, co-author of the Transformer paper
- Research + product: Balanced model (Command A) released for research; nonprofit research arm ensures open contributions alongside enterprise-grade products
- Strategic partnerships: Collaborations include Oracle, RBC, LG, Fujitsu, Salesforce, LivePerson, and more.
