Cohere Raises $270 Million to Bring Generative AI to Enterprises and Compete with OpenAI

Cohere AI, a Toronto-based startup that provides access to natural language processing (NLP) through large language models, has raised $270 million in a Series C funding round led by Inovia, with participation from multinational technology giants like NVIDIA, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, and others. This new investment has valued the company at over $2 billion. Cohere, founded in 2019, offers cloud-agnostic enterprise AI solutions that can be integrated with existing cloud environments or deployed on-site or through virtual private cloud (VPC). The company’s foundation models have been widely acclaimed, with some experts ranking Cohere’s offerings among the best from OpenAI and Google. The funding frenzy in generative AI started after Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI in January this year, with several companies competing against OpenAI, such as Anthropic, which recently raised $450 million in Series C funding. Cohere emphasizes that its AI suite can be easily integrated with different environments, reducing the barriers for enterprises and startup founders aiming to adopt NLP. Cohere was reportedly in talks with Google and Nvidia in October 2022.