Canadian AI startup Cohere has raised $500m in an oversubscribed funding round, achieving a valuation of $6.8bn.
The round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from existing investors such as AMD Ventures, NVIDIA, PSP Investments, and Salesforce Ventures, alongside new investors including the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP).
The newly acquired capital will be directed towards accelerating Cohere’s agentic AI offerings, following a series of strategic partnerships with major companies including Oracle, Dell, Bell, Fujitsu, and SAP.
Founded in 2019, Cohere provides AI-powered tools designed to automate tasks across various industries.
The company competes with prominent US AI companies such as OpenAI and Google in the development of large language models that support its technology.
In a concurrent move, Cohere has appointed Joelle Pineau, the former vice-president for AI research at Meta, as its first chief AI officer.
Pineau, a Canadian computer scientist and professor at McGill University, previously led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team.
Additionally, Cohere has named Francois Chadwick, a former executive at Uber and partner at KPMG US, as its new CFO.
Chadwick will oversee finance and business operations as the company aims to accelerate growth and cater to its expanding global customer base.
Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, said: “Cohere is becoming the world’s chosen partner for integrating AI into their critical industries. We are at a pivotal moment in accelerating the delivery of secure AI that empowers enterprises worldwide, and we’re excited to enter this new phase of expansion alongside our partners.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Joelle and Francois, whose experience, talent and insight will be instrumental in continuing Cohere’s growth.”
Radical Ventures co-founder and managing partner Jordan Jacobs said: “Cohere is fulfilling that promise by building privacy-first, cloud-agnostic models and agentic AI applications that are driving extraordinary productivity gains and ROI to blue-chip enterprises, businesses and governments worldwide. “We are co-leading this investment round because this is just the beginning for Cohere.”
