Cohere rockets to $6.8B valuation as AMD, Nvidia & Salesforce double down

Cohere just pulled off a huge win. On Thursday, the Toronto-based AI startup revealed it had closed an oversubscribed $500 million funding round, boosting its valuation to $6.8 billion — up from $5.5 billion just over a year ago when it raised the exact same amount. Not bad for a company that’s been quietly building in the shadows of the AI hype machine.

Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez — one of the brains behind the “Attention Is All You Need” paper that kicked off the transformer revolution — Cohere was an early player in large language models (LLMs). But while OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have been battling it out for the spotlight, Cohere has taken a different route: building enterprise-first, security-focused AI models instead of chasing the consumer chatbot craze.

That focus has paid off. Cohere has inked deals with heavyweights like Oracle, Dell, Bell, Fujitsu, LG CNS, and SAP — plus major enterprise clients like RBC. Even the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan jumped in as a new investor this round. The company couldn’t resist a cheeky jab in its press release, saying it delivers “a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models.” Shots fired.

And yes, they’re also playing the competitive hiring game. Cohere recently scored Joelle Pineau, a long-time leader at Meta AI, as its new Chief AI Officer, and brought on a new CFO — Francois Chadwick, whose resume includes Uber, Shield AI, and KPMG.

This $500M round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. Radical has previously backed Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs and AI players like Hebbia and Writer, while Inovia is a well-known Canadian VC with a portfolio that includes Poolside and Neo4j. Returning investors like AMD Ventures, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures also doubled down — though Oracle, an earlier backer, was notably absent from the list. (We’ve asked Cohere about that.)

Worth noting: Oracle invested in Cohere last year, but lately, the database giant seems more focused on its partnership with OpenAI, especially through its massive “Stargate” data center project.