Canadian AI specialist Cohere secured $500 million in fresh funding, valuing the company at $6.8 billion as it looks to accelerate the development of agentic AI solutions and expand its global footprint.
Cohere stated the capital will be used to scale its enterprise-focused agentic AI offerings, aimed at automating routine processes while prioritising data security, sovereign data control and regulatory compliance. “This represents a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models,” the company stated.
The funding round was led by venture capital companies Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with backing from existing supporters including AMD Ventures, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures.
To support its AI ambitions, Cohere also appointed two new senior executives. Joelle Pineau, who served as VP of AI Research at Meta and headed its Fundamental AI Research group, will join as chief AI officer. Pineau left Meta in May after an eight-year tenure. Meanwhile, former Uber and Shield AI executive Francois Chadwick will take the helm as CFO.
Cohere CEO and co-founder Aidan Gomez said the new hires and funding put the company at a “pivotal moment” in delivering secure AI for critical industries.
Indeed, the AI specialist highlighted that its latest move follows “a year of accelerated growth” after the company rolled out its agentic AI tool North in January. Cohere also reiterated that partnerships with Oracle, Dell, RBC, Bell, Fujitsu, LG CNS, SAP and Ensemble Health Partners are already in place to target sectors including finance, healthcare, telecoms, manufacturing, energy and the public sector.
Radical Ventures’ co-founder and managing partner Jordan Jacobs noted the AI company’s “privacy-first, cloud-agnostic” models are already delivering “extraordinary productivity gains” to enterprises and governments across the world.
The news arrives hot on the heels of a deal between Cohere and Bell Canada last month, as the operator became the AI startup’s preferred Canadian AI infrastructure provider and access to data centres.