Enterprise AI developer partnered with tech giant LG and South Korean government for AI diplomacy program.
Toronto-based Cohere is expanding its presence in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region as the startup looks to bring its multilingual artificial intelligence (AI) products to global companies and governments.
The enterprise AI developer announced it plans to open an office in Seoul, South Korea and expand its existing team in the East Asian tech hub.
Cohere is helping LG CNS deploy an “intelligent AI diplomatic security data platform” for South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Cohere has also hired Andrew Chang, formerly the area vice-president (VP) and country manager at the data infrastructure platform Confluent, as its new VP of APAC.
“We’re focused on building a strong local team, supporting forward-thinking customers, and partnering with the [South Korean] government to deliver secure AI solutions that drive meaningful impact across the public and private sectors to fuel economic productivity,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in a statement.
The news comes after Cohere’s recent announcement of a new office in Montréal, where it seeks to attract more machine learning and AI talent. Headquartered in Toronto, Cohere has offices in London, San Francisco, and New York.
Founded in 2019, Cohere sells agentic AI tools and solutions to enterprise clients such as the Royal Bank of Canada, Fujitsu, and Dell Technologies. It also has a non-profit research division, Cohere Labs, which publishes open science papers on machine learning and AI.
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This isn’t Cohere’s first foray into the APAC region. In March, Cohere announced a partnership with LG CNS, the business information technology (IT) arm of South Korean tech giant LG. Using Cohere’s multilingual large-language models (LLMs), LG is developing business solutions for Korean clients.
Cohere is also helping LG CNS deploy an “intelligent AI diplomatic security data platform” for the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A Korean-language article in ZDNet appears to indicate the AI platform will help the diplomatic service monitor global issues and threats by gathering data and generating reports related to international diplomacy. The program will also help draft and manage diplomatic documents for the Korean diplomatic service, according to the article. The Cohere-powered LLM can handle requests in 23 languages, the company claimed.
In the Asia Pacific region, Cohere has also developed a custom LLM for a partnership with Japanese IT services company Fujitsu in October. Fujitsu also participated in the Canadian startup’s $500-million USD Series D round at a $5.5-billion valuation.
As part of the expansion, Cohere Labs is opening eligibility for its research grant program to South Korean researchers. The research grant program offers credits towards Cohere’s application programming interface (API) product and grants to selected AI researchers in fields such as AI model safety and multilingual functions.
Feature image courtesy Josip Ivankovic via Unsplash.