AI startup will reportedly be a tenant of CoreWeave-operated data centre in Cambridge, Ont. next month.
Toronto-based enterprise AI startup Cohere is opening a Montréal office, it announced today, which it says will serve as a “key hub” for the large-language model (LLM) developer to draw in talent and strengthen research partnerships.
Cohere said it wants to build up long-standing ties in Québec’s AI scene, particularly at AI research institute Mila.
Cohere currently has seven employees in Montréal and said it plans to triple that number, adding to the 400-plus headcount of the company overall.
BetaKit asked Cohere where the office would be located within the city, but did not hear back by press time.
Founded in 2019, Cohere provides enterprise AI tools, selling its workspace platform North to clients such as the Royal Bank of Canada and Ensemble Health Partners. It also has a non-profit research division, Cohere Labs, which publishes open science papers on machine learning and AI.
“This represents an excellent opportunity for Cohere to grow our Canadian talent base and strengthen our relationships with the Montréal, Québec, and Canadian governments, and businesses throughout the region,” CEO Aidan Gomez said in a statement.
The company recently inked a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government to help “transform” government operations with AI and collaborate on AI research with the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI).
Cohere is also the recipient of $240 million in federal funding through the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy to help build an AI data centre to train LLMs in Canada. When the funding was announced, Cohere told BetaKit that it would be partnering with American cloud computing firm CoreWeave to build the facility.
Yesterday, The Globe & Mail reported that CoreWeave plans to open a data centre in Cambridge, Ont., next month with Cohere as one of its customers. BetaKit has reached out to Cohere for comment.
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Headquartered in Toronto, Cohere has offices in London, San Francisco, and New York. The Montréal expansion reinforces the company’s focus on Canada, after Gomez called for domestic companies to build in Canada and reject the “Valley-or-bust mentality” at Homecoming during Toronto Tech Week.
Montréal and Québec more broadly are known as hubs for deep learning and machine learning research. Québec was home to a quarter of all graduates from AI-focused academic programs recognized by AI institutes in Canada in 2023, according to a report by consulting firm Deloitte. In a 2024 KPMG in Canada survey of Québec organizations, 76 per cent said they have adopted generative AI into their workflows, the highest rate in Canada.
With the expansion, Cohere said it wants to build up long-standing ties in Québec’s AI scene, particularly at AI research institute Mila. The institute, founded by deep learning researcher and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, is a non-profit organization considered to be the world’s largest academic centre for deep learning.
In 2022, shortly after launching its research division, Cohere partnered with Mila to collaborate on natural-language processing projects and expand its access to machine learning talent.
“We are at a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI, and a strong partnership between Mila and Cohere has never been more significant,” Valerie Pisano, president and CEO of Mila, said in a release today about Cohere’s expansion.
Cohere added that its emphasis on support across multiple languages, including French, will help meet the needs of business and public-sector organizations in Québec. The company has built Aya Expanse, a language model capable of responding to more than 100 languages.
Feature image courtesy Grant Van Cleemput via Unsplash.