Enterprise AI model developer Cohere announced on Wednesday that it has completed a new $100 million funding round, increasing its valuation from $6.8 billion to $7 billion. This funding is an extension of the company's $500 million funding round in August, which saw oversubscription.
In addition to the funding news, Cohere also announced an impressive partnership. At a time when competitor OpenAI recently received a $100 billion investment commitment from NVIDIA, Cohere chose to partner with AMD, NVIDIA's main competitor, and AMD is also one of Cohere's investors.
According to the agreement, Cohere's full Command series AI models, including the Command vision model, translation model, and reasoning model, are now fully supported on AMD Instinct GPUs. This GPU product line is AMD's core product for competing with NVIDIA GPUs. In addition, AMD will use Cohere's AI services internally as a customer. However, Cohere told TechCrunch that the company will not abandon support for NVIDIA GPUs and will not exclusively support AMD.
Cohere was founded in 2019. Co-founder Aidan Gomez is one of the key authors of the "transformer" paper that drove the development of modern generative AI. The company was once a pioneer in the field of AI models. However, despite achieving a valuation increase from zero to $7 billion in six years, which may have been considered a milestone in the past, Cohere has now been surpassed by competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It is reported that OpenAI's valuation reached $500 billion last month, while Anthropic's valuation reached $183 billion at the beginning of this month.
Facing fierce competition, Cohere, which has always focused on the enterprise market, is promoting its services to enterprises that value "AI sovereignty," helping them maintain local control over data and models rather than relying on foreign technology providers.
In this $100 million funding round, Canada's Business Development Bank (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management, known for its Singapore business network, became new investors, reflecting the importance that investors place on the concept of AI sovereignty.
Industry analysts believe that Cohere's partnership with AMD reflects the diversification of the AI industry ecosystem. As companies increasingly demand data security and technological independence, AI companies focusing on enterprise-level services and emphasizing localized deployment are expected to find a differentiated position in the market. At the same time, AMD is also working to build a complete ecosystem capable of challenging NVIDIA's market dominance through partnerships with leading AI companies.
