Nvidia backs $500M funding round for Cohere at $6.8B valuation

Confirming recent reports, large language model developer Cohere Inc. today announced that it has raised $500 million in funding.

Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital jointly led the Series D investment. They were joined by Nvidia Corp., AMD Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and several other institutional backers. The deal values Cohere at $6.8 billion, up from $5 billion after its previous $500 million raise last June.

Toronto-based Cohere offers a series of enterprise-focused LLMs called Command. The most capable model in the series, Command A, debuted this past March. Cohere says that it can match the performance of GP4-o across many tasks and generate prompt responses 75% faster.

The company offers its LLMs alongside embedding models. Those are neural networks used to turn files into a condensed numerical form that LLMs can understand. According to Cohere, its newest embedding model can process multimodal records and documents up to 200 pages in length. 

Enterprises can access the company’s models through cloud-based application programming interfaces or deploy them on-premises. According to Cohere, customers who take the latter route may optionally use an air-gapped configuration. Air-gapped LLMs run on on-premises infrastructure that can’t be accessed over the web.

Cohere is reportedly seeing growing demand for its AI models. In late July, The Information reported that the company expects its annualized revenue to top $200 million by year’s end. That would represent a nearly 200% increase from February.

Cohere announced today’s funding round alongside two executive appointments. Prominent machine learning researcher Joelle Pineau is the company’s new Chief AI Officer, while former Uber Technologies Inc. executive Francois Chadwick has been named as Chief Technology Officer. 

Pineau previously headed Meta Platforms Inc.’s FAIR machine learning lab. She told TechCrunch that she plans to focus more of Cohere’s research efforts on North, an AI productivity platform that the company launched last week. The platform uses AI agents to automate tasks such as syncing data between business applications.

Pineau also indicated that she plans to grow Cohere’s AI development team. As part of the effort, the company could reportedly hire machine learning researchers from Meta.

Francois Chadwick, Cohere’s new CTO, previously held the same role at Uber. He helped take the ride-hailing provider public in 2019. The appointment suggests Cohere may be laying the groundwork for an eventual stock market listing of its own.

In the more immediate future, the company may seek to use some of its newly raised funding to make acquisitions. The investment comes a few weeks after Cohere bought Vancouver-based AI provider Ottogrid. The startup developed a platform that uses AI agents to speed up market research projects.

Image: Cohere