Cohere chief AI officer Joelle Pineau says the Toronto-based AI company intends to remain headquartered in Canada.
“I want to be unambiguously clear: Canada is our home and we will always remain headquartered here,” Pineau, who joined Cohere last summer, wrote in a post to X on Tuesday. “As I shared in my testimony, I joined Cohere to help advance Canadian AI leadership, and that won’t change.”
This pledge comes amid reported merger discussions between Cohere and fellow enterprise AI firm, Germany’s Aleph Alpha. Reports from Handelsblatt and The Globe and Mail have indicated that the two companies are currently in talks to combine. When asked about these reports, Cohere told BetaKit that it doesn’t comment on “market rumours or speculation.”
“I want to be unambiguously clear: Canada is our home and we will always remain headquartered here.”
Joelle Pineau, Cohere
Any such merger would be politically sensitive for Canada and Germany given the importance of both businesses to their respective countries’ AI ambitions. Handlesblatt has reported that the new entity would have offices in Canada and Germany, with the German government as an anchor customer, while a source that spoke with The Globe and Mail expects Cohere’s core presence and intellectual property to remain in Canada given it is the larger of the two firms.
When Pineau was asked yesterday by Conservative Member of Parliament and Shadow Minister for Industry Raquel Dancho whether Cohere could commit to staying Canadian-owned and headquartered during her testimony before the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Industry and Technology, her answer was more ambiguous than what she shared Tuesday.
“I’m not going to dive into the speculation,” Pineau said. “What I can certainly assure you is Cohere was built in Canada. The founders are Canadian. We have growing teams in Canada. We just opened a team in Montréal—an office that I’m growing myself—and so I am fully confident that Canada will continue to be the home for a lot of the work that Cohere is doing.”
When Dancho followed up to confirm that Pineau could not commit to remaining Canadian, the chief AI officer said, “It’s not my role to comment on this.”
Dancho, who cited the up to $240 million CAD that Cohere was awarded by the feds last year to purchase computing power in Canada, highlighted the ambiguity in Pineau’s response in an X post of her own that has stirred mixed reactions. Some expressed disappointment with Pineau’s answer, while others questioned whether she was in a position to address the topic. Pineau’s comments Tuesday came in response to that post.
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Cohere is Canada’s horse in the foundation model race. It develops the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI applications. Unlike some of its big-name competitors, Cohere has bet on specialized deployment of smaller, custom LLMs for businesses rather than chasing larger, “do-everything” frontier models.
Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez said last June during Toronto Tech Week that Cohere is “not for sale,” adding that, “Any sort of exit that would take us out of Canada is only if we fail, and we haven’t failed. I think acquisition is failure; it’s ending this process of building.”
Some industry leaders have argued that the Government of Canada’s forthcoming AI strategy should pick domestic winners, and the feds have already broadcast their intention to make Cohere into “a Canadian champion”—a designation Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst recently called “enormously motivating.”
Pineau followed up her assertion that Cohere would remain Canadian-headquartered by noting on X that the company “aims for long-term growth and the protection of Canadian data and intellectual property,” adding, “as we grow, we want to export Canadian values everywhere around the world and forge partnerships to build a sovereign and secure AI.”
“If leading AI companies from Canada and Germany were to join forces, it would be a very strong signal,” Karsten Wildberger, Germany’s minister for digital transformation and government modernization, told BetaKit in an email statement, noting that Germany and Canada already work closely together on digitalization and AI.
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Wildberger said “such a step would therefore also be an important political statement,” adding that “AI is not only about powerful models and global scaling, but also about key questions of sovereignty—for Germany and Europe.”
In an email statement provided to BetaKit, Canadian Minister of AI and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon’s office said it does not comment on private commercial discussions between companies, adding that “any corporate transaction involving Canadian firms is a matter for the companies themselves and their shareholders.”
“Canada and Germany are close partners on AI and sovereign technology,” the statement continues. “Minister Solomon and Minister Wildberger have been working closely together, including through the Sovereign Technology Alliance announced in February, to deepen cooperation on trusted AI, secure infrastructure, and shared strategic priorities.”
Solomon’s office also emphasized that “Canada supports deeper cooperation with trusted partners like Germany,” in order to help Canadian AI companies grow and compete globally.
Meanwhile, Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang joined the conversation in a more humorous and less direct fashion, asking where he could find the German equivalents of Brampton and Toronto tech community builder Tommy Trinh.
Feature image courtesy Gabriel Hutchinson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.