Cohere

What it is

Cohere is a Canadian enterprise AI company headquartered in Toronto, with offices in Montreal, New York City, San Francisco, London, Paris and Seoul^[1]. It builds large language models and enterprise products for businesses, rather than mainly consumer chat apps. Its best-known model line is Command^[1][5].

Origins

Cohere was co-founded in 2019 in Toronto by Aidan Gomez, who serves as chief executive, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst. All three attended the University of Toronto. Gomez was a co-author of the Transformer paper "Attention Is All You Need" while at Google Brain, and Frosst was also a Google Brain researcher^[1].

Funding came in several rounds. A $40 million Series A led by Index Ventures in September 2021 was followed by a $125 million Series B led by Tiger Global in February 2022. In June 2023 a $270 million Series C valued the company at $2.2 billion, with Inovia, Oracle, Salesforce and Nvidia taking part. In July 2024 it raised $500 million from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu at a $5.5 billion valuation^[1].

On 14 August 2025 Cohere announced a $500 million round led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital at a $6.8 billion valuation, with Nvidia and AMD Ventures participating. An additional $100 million in September 2025 raised the valuation to about $7 billion^[2][1].

Partnerships and research

In November 2021 Cohere formed a partnership with Google Cloud and trains its models on Google's TPUs. Other partners include Oracle, which in June 2023 put Cohere technology inside Oracle Fusion Cloud and NetSuite; McKinsey; Fujitsu, which in 2024 worked with Cohere on the Japanese LLM Takane; SAP, from May 2025; and Bell Canada, from July 2025^[1].

In June 2022 Cohere launched Cohere For AI, a nonprofit research lab that was later renamed Cohere Labs. Sara Hooker led it until September 2025. The lab produced the open multilingual Aya models, beginning with Aya, which covers 101 languages and was released in February 2024^[1][7].

Products

The main model line is Command. Command, released in 2023, was followed by Command R and Command R+ in March and April 2024. Command A arrived in March 2025 with 111 billion parameters and runs on two GPUs, and it has Vision and Reasoning variants. Command A+, released in May 2026, is a 218-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model under the Apache 2.0 licence^[1][5][6].

In August 2025 Cohere made North, its agentic enterprise workspace, generally available. North had launched in early access in January 2025, and customers named include RBC, Dell and LG CNS^[4].

People and finances

In August 2025 Cohere hired Joëlle Pineau as chief AI officer and Francois Chadwick as its first chief financial officer. Martin Kon, formerly YouTube's CFO, became president and chief operating officer in December 2022^[1].

Reported annualised revenue grew from about $22 million in March 2024 to $100 million in May 2025 and $150 million in October 2025. CNBC reported revenue of $240 million in February 2026^[1][3].

Legal and corporate developments

In February 2025, 14 publishers, including The Atlantic, Condé Nast and Forbes, sued Cohere for copyright infringement. They alleged that Cohere had trained its models on their content without a licence^[1].

In April 2026 Cohere agreed to combine with German AI company Aleph Alpha, with about €500 million of financing from Schwarz Group behind the combination. A definitive agreement was signed on 16 September 2026. The combined company is reportedly worth about $20 billion and would operate as Cohere, with dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin, pending regulatory approval^[3][1].

Place in development

Cohere is one of the main companies building language models for business use, and Command is its most visible product line. Its partnerships with cloud and enterprise software companies extend its reach^[1].

The pending combination with Aleph Alpha is not yet complete. Readers should check later statements from both companies for the final structure and the regulatory outcome.