Cohere announces first close of a Series E of up to C$7bn and a C$4bn Canada pledge
Schwarz Group led a round at a C$35.7bn valuation with the Government of Canada as a new investor; the amount raised so far was not disclosed. Cohere reported 165% annual recurring revenue growth.
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Cohere, the Toronto-based developer of enterprise language models, announced the initial close of a Series E round. According to the press release as reproduced by Light Reading, the round is “targeting up to” C$7bn at a valuation of C$35.7bn. The amount raised at this first close was not disclosed, so C$7bn is a target rather than a total.
Schwarz Group, the German retail and cloud group, led the round. New investors named were Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital and the Government of Canada, whose amount and terms were not given. Inovia Capital, Nvidia and Prosperity7 Ventures returned. The Schwarz involvement had been previewed in September, when Cohere agreed to merge with Aleph Alpha; that entry recorded a commitment of around $600m from Schwarz to the Series E. Cohere described the round as the largest private financing by a Canadian technology company, which is its own characterisation.
Cohere reported 165% year-on-year growth in annual recurring revenue for the third quarter, which it attributed to new customers and expansions of its North agent platform, and said its customer base had grown twentyfold in a year to 300. These are company figures and the release gave no revenue total.
The next day Cohere published a separate commitment to spend more than C$4bn on research and development and AI infrastructure in Canada across 2024 to 2031, and to employ more than 1,500 people in Canada by 2031, about 1,000 of them in technical roles, plus more than 250 paid student positions by 2029. The post also named a C$309m GPU cloud partnership with Bell AI Fabric for running Cohere’s models on Canadian infrastructure, and new collaborations with the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. The post mentions neither the Series E nor any government funding for the pledge, so it is not possible from the document to say how the two relate, though both fit the “sovereign AI” framing the company has used since the Aleph Alpha deal.
The round gave Cohere a state-backed Canadian shareholder at a time when it is positioning itself as an alternative to US and Chinese model providers.