Organisation
Cohere
An enterprise-focused lab building large language models for businesses and governments rather than the consumer market, with an emphasis on private deployment.
Cohere is a Toronto-based AI company, co-founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez — one of the authors of the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture — that builds large language models aimed at businesses and governments rather than the consumer market. Where OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind chase mass-market chatbots, Cohere has staked out enterprise deployment, with an emphasis on running models privately and keeping customer data under the customer's control. It raised a $500 million round in 2025 at a $6.8 billion valuation — well behind its larger rivals — and has faced a copyright lawsuit from a group of publishers, but remains one of the few independent labs built specifically around the enterprise-AI market.
- Category
- Frontier & foundation-model labs
- Founded
- 2019
- HQ
- Toronto, CA
- Funding
- $500m Series D at $6.8bn valuation (2025)
- Key people
- Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang
Appears alongside
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Money & business 3
- Benchmarks & progress 2
- Models & capabilities 2
- Courts & copyright 1
- Labs & people 1
Cohere raises $500M Series D at $6.8B valuation
The round, co-led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, came with Joelle Pineau, formerly Meta's VP of AI research, joining as chief AI officer.
Money & business
'The Leaderboard Illusion' paper critiques Chatbot Arena methodology
Researchers found Meta tested roughly 27 private Llama variants before its public release and that OpenAI and Google alone received about 40% of all Arena battle data.
Benchmarks & progress
14 publishers sue Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement
The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, cited more than 4,000 allegedly infringed articles and 75 example outputs, and added a trademark claim over fabricated brand attributions.
Courts & copyright
Cohere releases Command R+
Launched first on Microsoft Azure, the larger companion to March's Command R kept the same 128K context but was pitched as competitive with GPT-4-class models.
Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress
Cohere releases Command R
The 35-billion-parameter model targeted enterprise retrieval-augmented generation and tool use with a 128K-token context window, ahead of a larger Command R+ in April.
Models & capabilities
Cohere raises $270M Series C at $2.2B valuation
The $2.1-2.2bn valuation came in well below the more than $6bn some reports had floated, and the round was led by Inovia Capital with Nvidia and Oracle among the backers.
Money & business
Cohere raises a $125 million Series B
Tiger Global led the round, taking the Toronto language-model company past $170 million raised and marking early investor appetite for OpenAI competitors.
Money & business · Labs & people
Also mentioned in 3 entries
Referenced in passing — Cohere isn't the main subject of these.