AI startup Cohere in talks to raise funding at $6B plus valuation

Cohere, an AI foundation model company that competes with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a funding round that could value the startup at more than $6 billion, sources told Reuters, in the latest sign of the investment frenzy around generative AI.

Toronto-based Cohere, established by former researchers at Alphabet in 2019, has quickly risen through the AI startup ranks given their intensive research background and close ties to Google, investors said.

Foundation models are AI systems that are trained on large sets of data, with the ability to learn from new data to perform a variety of tasks. Generative AI aims to make human-like creations through computer code that has processed vast amounts of data.

Cohere is planning on introducing a new dialogue model that would resemble ChatGPT to let enterprise users generate text and engage with the model to refine the output. Unlike ChatGPT, Cohere’s technology will mainly be accessible to developers and businesses, CEO Aidan Gomez told Reuters in an interview.

“Our chat models are focused more on business applicable tasks like answering questions than writing poems. We don’t plan to hand them over to everyone to use for free without limit,” said Gomez. “We want to build a healthy and sustainable business.”

Gomez declined to comment on the funding status of the company.

It was not immediately clear how much Cohere was seeking to raise in the current round. Sources requested anonymity for discussing private funding matters.

Cohere has raised $170 million to date from funds including Index Ventures, Tiger Global and AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Pieter Abbeel.

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