Martin Kon, president of Toronto-based Cohere, is stepping down to assume a new advisory role, the company said.
Kon, who was also Cohere’s chief operating officer, will retain his spot on the enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) company’s board of directors.
“Martin continues to be a key member of the Cohere team,” the company said in a statement to BetaKit. Cohere did not say whether a replacement had been appointed for Kon.
The Logic first reported the leadership change, which comes weeks after Cohere raised $500 million USD at a $6.8-billion USD valuation and shook up its C-suite. It appointed Canadian computer scientist Joelle Pineau, formerly of Meta, as its first chief AI officer. Ex-Uber executive Francois Chadwick joined as the company’s first CFO. Phil Blunsom was also promoted from chief scientist to CTO, following the departure of CTO Saurabh Baji. Days before, Cohere Labs head Sara Hooker announced she would leave the company’s non-profit research arm in September.
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Kon joined Cohere from YouTube in early 2023, where he had served as the video platform’s CFO, known internally as the business financial officer. Before that, he worked as a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group and as a partner at consultancy Oliver Wyman for nearly 20 years. In addition to his role at Cohere, Kon is an advisor at San Francisco-based Akkadian Ventures and American private equity firm KKR.
Founded in 2019 by former Google researchers, Cohere builds large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots and other AI applications for companies and government agencies. Earlier this month, it signed a non-binding agreement with the Canadian government to explore AI use in the public sector. With a focus on large enterprises with high security needs, Cohere’s customers include Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
In addition to the fundraising and executive changes, Cohere has released two new AI models this month: Command A Reasoning, which is now the core generative AI model powering its enterprise platform North, and Command A Translate, which supports 23 languages. Cohere claimed in a blog post today that Command A Translate outperforms leading translation models, including Google Translate and OpenAI’s GPT-5, on translation quality (which measures the absence of errors).
Feature image courtesy Kauffman Fellows via X.