Generative AI startup Cohere announced that it has secured $270 million in new capital as part of its Series C funding round. "Funding will accelerate Cohere's leadership in delivering the power of AI to businesses on the cloud platform of their choice, protecting the privacy and security of their data."
The round was led by Inovia, with participation from Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and others, valuing the company at $2.2 billion. Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, Cohere provides generative AI models through a cloud-hosted API.
According to the introduction, Cohere's AI platform is designed for enterprises, providing data security deployment options in the company's existing cloud environment, customization and customer support. Includes an ecosystem of consulting and system integrator partners to assist businesses at any stage of their AI journey. Cohere's enterprise AI suite is cloud-agnostic and can be deployed in a customer's existing cloud environment or within a virtual private cloud (VPC), or even on-site.
Cohere CEO and co-founder Gomez believes AI will be at the heart of driving business success over the next decade. He said, "As early enthusiasm for generative AI turns to ways to accelerate business, companies are turning to Cohere to help them succeed in this new era of technology. The next phase of AI products and services will revolutionize business, and we're ready." It’s good to lead the trend.”
Gomez worked as an AI researcher at Google. In 2017, Gomez and a group of Google Brain colleagues co-authored a paper "Attention Is All You Need" that first proposed the Transformer concept; they all later decided to leave Google and founded their own startups. “We just decided we needed to do our own thing,” Gomez said. “We thought there were some fundamental barriers that kept businesses and young developers and startup founders from [adopting NLP], and there must be a way to remove those barriers . ”
A few weeks ago, another AI startup, Anthropic, also completed a $450 million investment led by Spark Capital at a valuation of $4.1 billion.