According to recent reports, Cohere announced today that it has successfully completed a $500 million funding round. This round was co-led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from multiple institutional investors including Nvidia, AMD Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. This funding has increased Cohere's valuation from $5 billion to $6.8 billion.
Image source note: The image is AI-generated, and the image licensing service is Midjourney
Cohere is based in Toronto and is a company focused on developing enterprise-level large language models (LLMs). The company has launched a series of models called "Command," with the most powerful one, "Command A," making its debut in March this year. Cohere claims that its models can match the performance of GPT-4 on multiple tasks and have 75% faster response times.
In addition to language models, Cohere also provides embedding models, a technology that converts documents into compact numerical forms that neural networks can understand. Cohere states that its latest embedding model can handle multi-modal records and documents up to 200 pages long.
Enterprise users can access Cohere's models through a cloud API or choose on-premise deployment, with the latter option allowing for an "isolated configuration." This configuration allows the LLM to run only on internal infrastructure and not be accessible via the internet.
Cohere has also shown strong demand growth recently. According to Information Weekly, the company expects its annualized revenue to exceed $200 million by the end of the year, nearly doubling the figure from February.
At the time of announcing the funding, Cohere also appointed two executives. Renowned machine learning researcher Joelle Pineau became the new Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, while former Uber executive Francois Chadwick took the role of Chief Technology Officer. Pineau previously led Meta's FAIR machine learning lab and stated that she will focus more research efforts on the AI productivity platform North, which was launched last week. This platform uses AI agents to automate tasks such as data synchronization.
Pineau also revealed that Cohere plans to expand its AI development team, possibly recruiting machine learning researchers from Meta. The appointment of Francois Chadwick suggests that Cohere may be preparing for an upcoming IPO.
In the short term, Cohere may use the newly raised funds for acquisitions. This funding comes after Cohere acquired Ottogrid, an AI company based in Vancouver, which develops a platform that uses AI agents to accelerate market research projects.
Key Points:
🌟 Cohere successfully raised $500 million, and its valuation has increased to $6.8 billion.
💡 The newly appointed executives will further drive the company's AI research and development.
🚀 Cohere plans to use the new funds for acquisitions to expand its market share.
