AI Hardware

Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu.

By Priya Khosla July 23, 2024

Source: TechCrunch

The round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, values Cohere at $5.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. That’s more than double the startup’s valuation from June 2023, when it secured $270 million from Inovia Capital and others, and brings Cohere’s total raised to $970 million.

Cohere’s AI platform is cloud agnostic, able to be deployed inside public clouds (e.g. Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services), a customer’s existing cloud, virtual private clouds or onsite. The startup takes a hands-on approach, working with customers to create tailored models based on their proprietary data.

Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere, told TechCrunch that the financing sets Cohere up for “accelerated growth.” “[We] continue to significantly expand our technical teams to build the next generations of accurate, data privacy-focused enterprise AI,” Gartner said in a statement. “Cohere is laser-focused on leading the AI industry beyond esoteric benchmarks to deliver real-world benefits in the daily workflows of global businesses across regions and languages.”

Cohere’s has proven to be a winning strategy, even as both OpenAI and Anthropic ramp up their respective enterprise sales efforts. At the end of March, Cohere was generating $35 million in annualized revenue with a customer base of hundreds of companies, up from around $13 million at the end of 2023, according to Bloomberg.

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