Toronto-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cohere has topped up and officially closed its Series D round, raking in $500 million USD at a $5.5 billion valuation ($687 million CAD at $7.6 billion).
Last month, BetaKit independently confirmed reports that Cohere had raised a first tranche of $450 million USD from returning backers that included chip giant Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, as well as new investors like Cisco and Canadian pension fund PSP Investments.
The initial raise came from a months-long fundraising effort by the OpenAI competitor, which had hoped to raise more capital at a $5-billion valuation and has now surpassed that goal.
UPDATE (07/23/2024): A Cohere spokesperson confirmed to Betakit that the Series D round did not include any secondary.
RELATED: Cohere launches program to help early-stage startups adopt AI and secures $450 million USD
According to BNN Bloomberg, the final raise was led by PSP and included backing from AMD Ventures, the venture arm of Nvidia competitor Advanced Micro Devices, the Crown corporation Export Development Canada (EDC), and Japanese IT services company Fujitsu. Last week, Cohere and Fujitsu announced a strategic partnership, in which the companies agreed to develop a Japanese large-language model (LLM) for private cloud usage, as Fujitsu made “a significant investment” into Cohere.
In a LinkedIn post, Cohere said it was excited to announce the Series D funding that would help “expand our team.” BNN reported that Cohere started 2024 with 250 employees and plans to double its headcount this year.
Founded in 2019 by Google Brain alumni, Cohere develops LLMs that can interpret and generate text in a way that simulates natural human language. Its competitors include OpenAI and Anthropic. Unlike some of its rivals, Cohere caters exclusively to businesses.
RELATED: Vantage points: Cohere’s Ivan Zhang on making Canada the place to scale
As of the end of March, Cohere generated $35 million USD in annualized revenue, up from $13 million last year. Cohere last raised $270 million USD in an all-equity, all-primary Series C round led by Inovia Capital in June 2023 at a reported $2-billion-plus valuation.
Cohere also launched its Startup Program last month, which aims to help companies at the Series B stage or below leverage AI at an affordable price point. One company in the program, Borderless AI, made its Cohere-powered AI agent for HR tasks free to use.
Earlier this year, Cohere unveiled Command R+ as its newest LLM, built off the predecessor Command R. The company claims its better performance makes it competitive with more expensive LLMs on “key business-critical capabilities.” Microsoft concurrently announced that Command R+ was being integrated into its Azure AI model catalogue through a new collaboration with Cohere.
With files from Josh Scott.
Feature image courtesy Cohere.
