Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) scaleup Cohere has officially opened an office in Paris, France that will serve as the company’s “central hub” for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).
In a blog post, the large language model (LLM) developer said its presence in EMEA is growing. It called the region “a key market” for the business and “a cornerstone” of its global strategy.
Cohere plans to double its headcount in Paris over the next year.
Paris is the home of European AI champion and Cohere competitor Mistral AI. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has sought to create a European AI hub in the country as part of a push to ensure Europe’s digital sovereignty.
News of Cohere’s Paris office comes shortly after the Toronto company closed $500 million USD to fuel its global expansion. In recent months, Cohere has shared plans to open offices in South Korea and Montréal.
Cohere expects to grow its Paris workforce to 20 employees by the end of the month. This will include a pair of new business and public policy leads that will join the company’s existing research, engineering, safety, and product teams in France.
The company is bringing on Salesforce vice-president (VP) of EMEA government affairs and public policy, Stéphanie Finck Piccin, as head of EMEA public policy. It will also hire a VP of EMEA, whom it intends to name at the end of September, to oversee growth and partnerships in the area.
These mark the latest in a series of leadership changes at Cohere that include a new chief AI officer Joelle Pineau, head of Cohere Labs Marzieh Fadaee, CFO Francois Chadwick, and CTO Phil Blunsom. Former CTO Saurabh Baji and president Martin Kon recently departed.
In total, Cohere plans to double its headcount in Paris over the next year as it looks to take advantage of “France’s outstanding AI talent pool.”
RELATED: Cohere to open South Korean office, expand AI offerings in Asia Pacific
Founded in 2019 by former Google researchers, Cohere builds LLMs that power chatbots and other AI applications. The company has raised approximately $1.5 billion USD to date, and was most recently valued at $6.8 billion CAD, making it one of Canada’s best-funded and most valuable private technology companies.
Cohere crossed $100 million USD in annualized revenue this May and expects to generate more than $200 million per year by the end of 2025. However, the 450-person firm faces stiff competition from larger American LLM makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as deep-pocketed tech giants like Google and Meta that are building their own AI models.
Cohere said its French team already plays an important technical leadership role globally for the company, contributing to its multilingual models and flagship agentic AI platform North.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Ante Samarzija.