Enterprise AI startup Cohere announced last week that it has raised $500 million at a valuation of $6.8 billion, led by Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures and others.
Moreover, the company announced that Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former VP of AI research and leader of the company’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, has now joined Cohere as the chief AI officer. Besides, the company has also announced a new chief financial officer and has appointed Francois Chadwick, who also once served as Uber’s acting CFO.
In May, it was reported that Cohere had doubled its annualised revenue since the start of this year and surpassed $100 million.
The startup, based out of Canada, was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, focusing exclusively on enterprise-grade AI solutions. Gomez was also a part of the team that authored the paper on transformers ‘Attention is All You Need’, which is the core architecture behind language models today.
As per Crunchbase, the company has raised a total of $1.6 billion in funding.
Strong Focus on Enterprise and Security
Notably, Cohere also defines its offerings as “a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not met by repurposed consumer models”.
Cohere’s product lineup offers high-performance LLMs, semantic search tools, multilingual models, search tools and additional features along similar lines for enterprises. Essentially, it provides general-purpose LLMs that enterprises can integrate into any of their systems.
Recently, the company announced ‘North’, a security-first agentic AI platform, which combines LLMs, search and automation into a secure AI workspace.
Like Google’s Vertex AI Agent Builder, Salesforce Agentforce, Cohere’s North lets employees create an AI agent for various tasks.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Gomez emphasised that the company’s competitive moat lies in security, as compared to OpenAI or Anthropic.
“There’s no other providers that’s able to provide a product that goes on-prem, that goes on any cloud, and that enterprises feel comfortable plugging in all of their data because it is not being sent to Cohere, it’s staying on their infrastructure,” he said.
North embeds enterprise-grade security at every layer with granular access controls, autonomy policies and continuous security testing. Cohere supports private, VPC, hybrid and on-premises deployments, paired with built-in monitoring and auditability.
It meets rigorous standards such as ISO 27001, ISO 42001, along with GDPR and SOC 2 requirements.
Besides the privacy aspect, the company also said that its platform North can be deployed with minimal hardware requirements, as few as two GPUs.
“Since ChatGPT has come out, the enterprise world has struggled to catch up and keep up with the consumer market. But it has started now. Last year was the year of PoC, but now, we’re seeing production,” Gomez said in the interview.
“We’ve already doubled revenue since the beginning of this year, and we’re seeing a total take off on the enterprise side of the business,” he added.