On Wednesday, the enterprise AI model-maker Cohere announced it raised an additional one hundred million dollars. This funding increases the company’s valuation to seven billion dollars and serves as an extension to a round announced in August. The August round was an oversubscribed five hundred million dollar round that valued the company at six point eight billion dollars.
Cohere also announced an interesting twist on a partnership. While its competitor OpenAI recently secured an investment of up to one hundred billion dollars from Nvidia, Cohere has signed a deal with AMD, which is also one of its investors. Cohere’s full suite of Command-family AI models, including Command vision, translate, and reasoning models, can now run on AMD’s Instinct GPU, a competitor to Nvidia’s GPUs. Furthermore, AMD will be using Cohere’s technology internally as a customer. However, Cohere clarifies that it is not abandoning support for Nvidia GPUs to exclusively support AMD.
Cohere began as a frontrunner in the AI model race. It was co-founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, one of the authors of the seminal “Transformer” paper that gave rise to the modern generative AI boom. While a journey from zero to a seven billion dollar valuation in six years would have been awe-inspiring a decade ago, Cohere has since been overshadowed by the rapid rise of OpenAI and its closest competitor, Anthropic. For instance, OpenAI was reportedly valued at five hundred billion dollars last month, while Anthropic reached a one hundred eighty-three billion dollar valuation earlier this month.
Cohere, which has always focused on the enterprise market, is now marketing itself to businesses where AI sovereignty is a priority. This concept involves keeping local control of data and models rather than putting them in the hands of a foreign entity. To support this direction, the Business Development Bank of Canada and Nexxus Capital Management, known for its Mexico and Iberia funds, were new investors in this latest one hundred million dollar round.