Cohere has struck strategic partnerships with two large enterprise players, Dell and SAP, as CEO Aidan Gomez teases that the artificial intelligence (AI) startup is approaching profitability.
The duo of partnerships will see German enterprise software maker SAP use Cohere models in its software and make them available through its Business Technology Platform, while Texas-based hardware giant Dell becomes the first provider to deploy Cohere’s AI workspace product, Cohere North, to enterprises on-premises.
Cohere North is an enterprise platform that integrates agentic capabilities and acts as a workspace where employees can query, search, and generate reports from internal data, with an emphasis on security. It’s a competitor to Microsoft’s Copilot 365 and Google’s Vertex AI.
RELATED: Cohere revenue reports paint mixed picture of growth
The partnerships come as reports on Cohere’s revenue paint a mixed picture of growth. Reuters reported last week that Cohere reached $100-million USD ($138 million CAD) in annualized revenue this month, while The Information reported that the Toronto-based AI model developer fell more than $350 million USD short of its revenue goals projections from 2023. CEO Aidan Gomez claimed more in a Bloomberg Television interview this week, saying that the company has “more than doubled” its revenue since the start of this year, and is also approaching profitability.
“We’re very, very close to crossing that line and becoming profitable,” Gomez said in the interview. “We’re not far away.”
Enterprises using SAP’s platform will be able to find Cohere models in its marketplace of AI options and integrate them into their workflow. The integration will begin with Cohere’s Rerank model and eventually adding Command and Embed. As part of the partnership, SAP said it plans to be one of the first partners to offer Cohere’s upcoming reasoning model, which it calls “a purpose-built, high-efficiency model designed to power agentic use cases.” SAP made a strategic investment of undisclosed size in Cohere in July 2023.
Through the Dell partnership, the Cohere North platform will be integrated with Dell’s PowerEdge servers and PowerScale storage, meaning it will sell server units pre-loaded with North.
“We’re proud to be the first provider to bring Cohere North’s capabilities to organizations [on-premises],” Ihab Tarazi, Dell’s CTO in the infrastructure solutions group, said in a statement. “By combining Cohere North’s advanced Agentic AI technology with Dell’s security hardened, scalable infrastructure, we’re setting a new standard.”
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 million USD.
Feature image courtesy Cohere