Cohere raises $500 million to hire former chief of coin Joelle Pineau as head of AI
The driving force behind Cohere’s providing secure AI tools for businesses is attracting big-name investors and high-profile technology leaders. The Canadian startup announced today (August 14) that it has raised $500 million in the oversubscribed funding round and has hired two senior executives to help it compete with competitors such as Openai and Anthropic.
Led by radical venture capital and Ionia Capital, the round is worth $6.8 billion, up from $5.5 billion in July last year. Other backers include NVIDIA, AMD, Salesforce and PSP investments.
Cohere also appointed Joelle Pineau as Chief AI Officer and Francois Chadwick as Chief Financial Officer. Pineau previously led Meta’s Basic AI Research (FAIR) team and held positions at McGill University and Mila Quebec AI Research Institute. Chadwick has held senior positions at Uber, KPMG and Shield AI.
“Cohere is very appealing to me because they are implementing AI in a way that fundamentally changes businesses and government operations,” Pineau said in a statement, who left Meta earlier this year. “They are realizing the full potential of AI”
When Cohere left for research Sara Hooker, the employee announced she would leave in three years and called the company for a “lifelong adventure.”
Founded in 2019 by three former Google researchers, including the influential 2017 paper “The Attention You Need is What You Need” CEO Aiden Gomez, Conhere focuses on custom large language models (LLMS) that focus on enterprise customers rather than mass consumer markets. Now, it has offices in Toronto, San Francisco, London and New York.
Participate in crowded areas
Cohere’s growth, with a reappearance of $100 million, is still far behind its biggest competitors. Openai’s regular revenue is about $13 billion, with a potential valuation of $500 billion. Humanity’s valuation is $170 billion in talks, with an annual revenue rate of $4 billion.
To close the gap, Cohere bets on its emphasis on security and privacy. The company offers private deployment options that allow customers to opt out of model training and run a wide range of threat detection and testing systems. This approach has helped it establish partnerships with key players in the financial, telecommunications and healthcare sectors, including Bell, Fujitsu, Oracle and Royal Bank of Canada.
Its latest product, North, is a platform for proxy AI deployed in private environments.
“Cohere is becoming a partner of the world’s choice to integrate AI into its key industries,” Gomez said in a statement. “We are at a critical moment to accelerate the delivery of secure AI that empowers enterprises around the world and we are excited to join our partners in this new phase of expansion.”
