Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) scaleup Cohere has closed $500 million USD ($690 million CAD) in fresh funding and added two former Meta and Uber executives to its C-suite.
Cohere recently crossed $100 million USD in annualized revenue and expects to hit $200 million by year-end.
The large-language model (LLM) developer’s latest round was led by returning Canadian investors Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. Fellow existing backers also participated, including chip giants AMD (through its venture capital arm AMD Ventures) and Nvidia, Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board, and Salesforce Ventures. The Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) was a new investor.
This all-equity, all-primary capital financing gives Cohere a $6.8-billion USD ($9.4-billion CAD) valuation, a 24 percent increase over the $5.5 billion USD number from its $500-million USD Series D last summer that further cements its status as one of Canada’s most valuable private tech companies. The Financial Times was first to report on Cohere’s latest fundraising efforts in June.
In addition to its fundraising, Cohere also announced two new executives, appointing Canadian computer scientist Joelle Pineau as its first chief AI officer and Francois Chadwick as the company’s first CFO.
Pineau recently departed Meta in May after serving as vice president of AI research and leading its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab. Since then, the tech giant has accelerated efforts to attract top AI talent with sky-high salaries from other Big Tech companies to build out its Meta Superintelligence Labs. Cohere has said it is not pursuing development of an “artificial general intelligence” and instead focusing on secure business use cases for AI tools.
Pineau will direct research and product development at Cohere based out of its new office in Montréal. Cohere has an ongoing partnership with local AI research institute Mila, where Pineau is a core academic member.
RELATED: Cohere pitches security and productivity with general release of North enterprise AI platform
Chadwick had previously served as Uber’s acting CFO and played a leadership role during the company’s initial public offering. Most recently a partner at consulting firm KPMG, Chadwick held CFO roles at defence intelligence startup Shield AI and electric vehicle network Volta Charging.
The new additions come shortly after Sara Hooker, the head of research division Cohere Labs, announced she would be departing the company after three years in the role. She later wrote in a LinkedIn post that she would stay on through September to oversee applications for Cohere’s Research Scholars program. Pineau will oversee Cohere Labs going forward.
Cohere confirmed to BetaKit that Phil Blunsom has also been promoted from chief scientist to CTO, alongside the departure of CTO Saurabh Baji, who assumed the role in March, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cohere plans to invest this funding in global expansion, talent, and compute as it looks to bring its enterprise AI solutions to customers worldwide. This builds on recently inked partnerships with large companies, including telecommunications giant Bell, and the public sector, including a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government.
Last month, the company made its workplace platform North publicly available, after having rolled out custom versions to enterprise clients such as LG CNS, Dell Technologies, and the Royal Bank of Canada. North allows users to create personalized AI agents to perform and automate work tasks, while offering security features such as on-premise deployment.
Founded in 2019 by former Google researchers, Cohere builds LLMs that power chatbots and other AI applications for companies and government agencies. It faces stiff competition from larger American LLM developers like OpenAI and Anthropic that have raised bigger sums, and deep-pocketed tech giants like Google and Meta that are building their own AI models. Cohere has now raised about $1.5 billion USD to date and grown to 450 employees.
Reuters recently reported that Cohere crossed $100 million USD in annualized revenue this May. According to The Information, Cohere has told investors that it expects to generate more than $200 million USD in annualized revenue by the end of 2025. A source familiar with Cohere’s operations confirmed to BetaKit that both metrics are accurate.
While both figures represent rapid growth compared to the $35 million USD in annualized revenue Cohere was on pace to bring in as of March 2024, they are reportedly far below the company’s previous sales forecasts, placing it well behind competitors OpenAI and Anthropic.
Feature image courtesy Toronto Tech Week.