 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | |
| Founded | 2019; 6 years ago (2019) |
| Founders | Aidan Gomez Ivan Zhang Nick Frosst |
| Headquarters |
|
Area served | worldwide |
Key people |
|
| Products |
|
| Revenue | $150M (October 2025) |
Number of employees | 450+ (2025)[4] |
| Website | cohere |
Cohere Inc. is a Canadian multinational technology company focused onartificial intelligence. Cohere specializes inlarge language models and AI products for regulated industries, particularly the finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy fields, as well as the public sector. Cohere was founded in 2019 byAidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, andNick Frosst and is headquartered inToronto andSan Francisco, with offices inMontreal,London,New York City,Paris, andSeoul.
In 2017, a team of researchers atGoogle Brain introduced thetransformer machine learning architecture in "Attention Is All You Need," which demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety ofnatural language processing tasks.[5][6][7] In 2019, Aidan Gomez, one of its co-authors, along with Nick Frosst,[8] another researcher at Google Brain, founded Cohere with Ivan Zhang, with whom Gomez had done research at FOR.ai.[9][10] All of the co-founders attendedUniversity of Toronto.[11]
Gomez is the company's CEO.[10] In December 2022, Martin Kon, the former CFO ofYouTube, became president and COO.[12]
In November 2021,Google Cloud announced that they would help power Cohere's platform using their robust infrastructure, and Cloud'sTPUs would be used by Cohere for the development and deployment of their products.[13][14]
In June 2022, Cohere launched Cohere Labs (previously called Cohere For AI), a nonprofit research lab and community dedicated to contributing open-source, fundamental machine learning research. It was led bySara Hooker, a former research scientist at Google Brain[15] until her departure in September 2025. Cohere Labs is now led by Marzieh Fadaee.[16]
In December 2022, Cohere released a multilingual model for understanding text that would work with over 100 languages, to help users search for documents by meaning instead of with keywords. This type of process was not previously widely available in languages other than English.[12]
On September 12, 2023, it was announced that Cohere had become one of fifteen tech companies to agree to sign on to a voluntaryWhite House commitment on measures for testing, reporting, and research on the risks of AI.[17] On September 27, 2023, it was announced that Cohere had also signed Canada's voluntary code of conduct for AI, to promote the responsible development and management of advanced generative AI systems.[18] In May 2025, Cohere acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating certain kinds of high-level market research.[19]
In 2024, Cohere opened a new office in New York City.[20][21][22] In 2025, they later expanded to Montreal, Canada,[23] Paris,[24] and Seoul.[25][26]
In June 2025, it was announced that Cohere had partnered with the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom to expand the use of AI in the public sector.[27]
In August 2025, Cohere announced it hiredJoelle Pineau as Chief A.I. Officer and Francois Chadwick, a formerUber executive andKPMG US partner, as its first Chief Financial Officer.[28]
Considered an alternative toOpenAI,[29] Cohere is focused on generative AI for the enterprise, building technology that businesses can use to deploy chatbots, search engines, copywriting, summarization, and other AI-driven products.[7][30] Cohere specializes inlarge language models: AI trained to digest text from an enterprises' internal data or publicly available sources like the internet to understand how to process and respond to prompts with increasing sophistication.[12]
The Cohere platform is available throughAPI as a managed service, through platforms such asAmazon SageMaker and Google's Vertex AI. It can be used for tasks such as writing copy, moderating content, classifying data, and extracting information. It is cloud agnostic and not tied to a particular cloud service.[10]
Cohere's generative AI technology is embedded into severalOracle products, and its chat capabilities are embedded intoSalesforce products.[29]
In March of 2025, Cohere's nonprofit research lab introduced Aya Vision, an AI model that can describe images, translate text, and summarize information. The model is free to use for research but is not permitted to be used for commercial purposes.[31]
On June 13, 2023,Oracle announced a partnership with Cohere to providegenerative AI services to help organizations automate end-to-end business processes. As a result, Cohere's technology is integrated into Oracle's business applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud, Oracle NetSuite, and Oracle industry-specific applications.[32]McKinsey announced a collaboration with Cohere, to help organizations integrate generative AI into their operations on July 18, 2023.[33] Cohere also partnered with software companyLivePerson to offer customized large language models for businesses in 2023.[7]here
In 2024, Cohere partnered withFujitsu in co-developing Takane, a Japanese LLM.[34][35]
In January 2025, in partnership withRBC, Cohere introduced North for Banking, a secure generative AI platform designed to enhance productivity and data security in financial services.[36]A partnership withLG developed a Korean LLM and customized the North platform for the specific needs of Korean companies.[37]In May 2025, Cohere partnered with SAP to integrate its AI models into SAP's Business Suite and make them available through SAP AI Core's generative AI hub.[38] Simultaneously, Cohere announced a collaboration with Dell Technologies, making Dell the first infrastructure provider to offer Cohere North, the company's secure AI workspace platform, for on-premises deployment.[39][40] Cohere also entered the healthcare sector through a partnership with Ensemble Health Partners, a revenue cycle management company, to deploy agentic AI solutions for healthcare providers' administrative workflows.[41][42]
In July 2025, Cohere announced a partnership withBell Canada to provide AI services to government and enterprise customers. Under the agreement, Bell Canada will deploy Cohere's technology on its data center infrastructure and offer AI solutions to clients. The partnership positions the services as a Canadian alternative to international cloud providers, with Bell also implementing Cohere's North platform for internal operations.[43]
On September 7, 2021, Cohere announced that they had raised $40 million in Series A funding led byIndex Ventures; Index Ventures partnerMike Volpi also joined Cohere's board.[13][14] The round also included Radical Ventures,Section 32, and AI-expertsGeoffrey Hinton,Fei-Fei Li,Pieter Abbeel, andRaquel Urtasun.[8]
In February 2022, Cohere announced they had raised $125 million in series B funding led byTiger Global.[44] In June 2023, Cohere raised an additional $270 million in series C funding from investors including Inovia Capital,Oracle,Salesforce, andNvidia, at a valuation of $2.2 billion.[7][45]
In March 2024, it was reported that Cohere had an annualized revenue run rate of $22 million and in July 2024 it was reported they closed $500 million in funding from investors includingCisco,AMD andFujitsu at a valuation of $5.5 billion.[46][47]
In December 2024, Cohere received $240 million in public funding from the Canadian government as part of the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy to support the construction of a domestic AIdata center.[48]
As of May 2025, Cohere's annual revenue was reported to be $100 million.[49][50] In October 2025, Cohere's annualized revenue reached $150 million.[51]
In 2025, Cohere raised US$500 million in a funding round led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, achieving a valuation of US$6.8 billion.[52] Following the investment, Inovia'sPatrick Pichette was appointed to Cohere's Board of Directors.[53]
In September 2025, Cohere announced a second close of its funding round, raising an additional $100 million and increasing its valuation to approximately $7 billion. The new investors included BDC and Nexxus Capital Management, joining previous backers from the initial $500 million close in August.[54][55]
Cohere was listed on theForbes AI 50 list in four consecutive years, 2022,[56] 2023,[57] 2024,[58] and 2025[59]
Fortune magazine listed the company on their 50 AI innovators list in 2023.[60]
Cohere was listed onCNBC's Disruptor list in 2023[61] and 2024.[62]
In February 2025, it was reported that a consortium of 14 publishing companies includingThe Atlantic,Condé Nast, andForbes had sued Cohere for copyright infringement, accusing Cohere of using their content for training without permission, as well as displaying considerable portions or entire articles of their content without permission.[63]
