Cohere raises $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation
Cohere, the Toronto-based large language model (LLM) startup, announced Thursday that it has secured an oversubscribed $500 million funding round, pushing its valuation to $6.8 billion — up from $5.5 billion just over a year ago when it last raised the same amount.
Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez — co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" paper that underpins modern AI — Cohere emerged early as a contender in the LLM race. But in recent years, the competitive spotlight has been dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Cohere has instead doubled down on a niche: providing secure, enterprise-focused AI models rather than consumer-oriented products.
That focus has yielded high-profile partnerships with enterprise tech giants such as Oracle, Dell, Fujitsu, Bell, LG CNS, and SAP, as well as corporate clients like RBC. The Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan joined as a new investor in this round. In its announcement, Cohere took a pointed swipe at its rivals, saying it “represents a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models.”
The company is also making high-profile talent acquisitions. It recently hired Joelle Pineau, Meta’s long-time head of AI research, as its new chief AI officer. Additionally, it brought in Francois Chadwick — formerly CFO at Shield AI and a finance leader at Uber — as its new chief financial officer.
This latest round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital. Radical has previously backed AI ventures including Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, Hebbia, and Writer. Inovia’s portfolio includes AI and data companies like Poolside and Neo4j. Existing investors AMD Ventures, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures also participated.
One notable absence from the investor list is Oracle, which backed Cohere in 2023 but has recently deepened its partnership with OpenAI through the massive Stargate data center initiative.
With fresh capital, a strengthened leadership team, and a sharpened enterprise AI positioning, Cohere is aiming to reassert itself in a crowded AI landscape — and to prove that “security-first” isn’t just a talking point, but a market differentiator.
