AI startup says it doubles revenue, reportedly hits $100-million USD annualized revenue but falls below forecasts.
As one report says Cohere has crossed a key revenue milestone, another suggests that the enterprise-focused artificial intelligence (AI) startup is lagging on its projected revenue growth.
Cohere confirmed it has acquired Vancouver-based AI agent startup Cognosys, whose Ottogrid platform will be integrated into Cohere’s workplace platform North.
Reuters reported that Cohere reached the coveted $100-million USD mark in annualized revenue this month, while The Information reported that the Toronto-based AI model developer fell 85 percent short of its projected revenue goals from 2023.
Reuters’s report that Cohere is bringing in $100 million USD in annualized revenue would propel the startup to centaur status. But the milestone could come as a consolation prize to investors, who were expecting much higher revenue at this point, according to The Information.
In February, The Information reported that Cohere was on track to generate $70 million USD in annualized revenue. A 2023 pitch deck the publication obtained shows this number is well below what the company told investors it would be making at this point. Cohere expected it would be bringing in $444.3 million USD in annualized revenue by December 2024, the report said.
The company declined to comment on the revenue reports, but said that monthly revenue has doubled since the beginning of 2025. Cohere head of communications Josh Gartner told The Information it’s “now seeing the hockey stick-shaped revenue growth we anticipated as companies deploy at scale—albeit slightly later than originally expected.”
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Jordan Jacobs, co-founder and managing partner at Cohere investor Radical Ventures, reposted and celebrated the $100-million annualized revenue milestone in a LinkedIn post, calling Cohere “one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies ever.”
Cohere is Canada’s best-funded large-language model (LLM) developer. It focuses on enterprise AI, selling to clients such as Fujitsu and Royal Bank of Canada. In summer 2024, Cohere closed $500 million USD in Series D financing at a $5.5-billion valuation, bringing its total funds raised to more than $900 billion USD.
Cohere also confirmed that it has acquired Vancouver-based AI agent startup Cognosys, whose Ottogrid platform will be integrated into Cohere’s North product. Cognosys raised a $2-million seed round in 2023 with backing from two of Cohere’s executives, CEO Aidan Gomez and CTO Ivan Zhang. The company declined to disclose the value of the transaction.
In a statement on X, Cognosys CEO Sully Omar said that bringing Ottogrid into North will “dramatically impact how people can automate their workflows, enrich their data, and scale their operations with table capabilities.”
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Though Cohere has built one of Canada’s few commercial LLMs, Gomez wrote in a December memo that the company will be shifting its focus to tailored, smaller language models going forward. The company claimed Command A, its latest LLM which was released in March, outperformed leading competitors on key benchmarks using significantly less computing power.
Cohere’s North enterprise platform integrates agentic capabilities and acts as a workspace where employees can query, search, and generate reports from internal data. It’s a competitor to Microsoft’s Copilot 365 and Google’s Vertex AI.
At World Summit AI in Montréal this April, Cohere strategy and operations lead Lewis Stott framed North as a turnkey solution allowing employees to use agents to help them do “time-consuming research” and “draft detailed reports.” He said the platform facilitates AI adoption because users don’t need technical expertise.
Cohere was also the first beneficiary of the federal government’s $2-billion Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy this past December, receiving $240 million CAD to build a multibillion-dollar AI data centre in Canada.
Feature image courtesy Cohere.