From left, Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst, former president Martin Kon, and CEO Aidan Gomez, in April, 2023. Mr. Kon announced he was stepping down as president on Thursday.NATHAN CYPRYS/The New York Times News Service
Cohere Inc. president Martin Kon is stepping down from his role after nearly three years in the position, according to the company.
The change follows a substantial fundraising round and other executive shuffles at the Toronto-based artificial-intelligence company.
Mr. Kon joined Cohere as president and chief operating officer in February, 2023, from YouTube, where he served as chief financial officer. He will remain on Cohere’s board of directors and move into an advisory role.
“Martin continues to be a key member of the Cohere team,” spokesperson Josh Gartner said in a statement.
Cohere announced a US$500-million fundraising round this month, valuing the company at US$6.8-billion.
At the same time, Cohere appointed former Meta Platforms Inc. AI researcher Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer. Francois Chadwick, who has held roles at KMPG and Uber Technologies Inc., joined as chief financial officer. Finally, Phil Blunsom was moved from the chief scientist role into the chief technology officer position.
Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, who is CEO, along with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang. All three founders have a computer science and machine learning background, and were in their 20s when OpenAI released ChatGPT in November, 2022. The chatbot kicked off a surge of interest and investment into generative AI.
As a result, Cohere went from being a curious startup to having to rapidly improve its technology, raise funds and ultimately win customers in an intensively competitive market dominated by deep-pocketed U.S. companies.
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Mr. Kon, who hails from Oakville, Ont., and earned an MBA from Queen’s University, was recruited from YouTube to help build out business functions and bring Cohere’s AI tools to enterprise customers.
Cohere also secured three large financing rounds during his tenure from investors such as Inovia Capital, PSP Investments and Nvidia NVDA-Q.
Cohere has scored a number of customer deals and partnerships recently. Royal Bank of Canada RY-T and Bell Canada BCE-T have signed onto its North platform, which can be used to automate and assist with many office tasks. Cohere has focused on multilingual capabilities as well, and partnered with LG CNS in South Korea and Fujitsu in Japan.
The company has built its technology to be useful for large enterprises and those in regulated industries where security and privacy is important, as opposed to developing consumer applications.
Cohere said this month it signed a non-binding agreement with the federal government to explore the use of AI in the public service.