(Reuters) -Canadian AI startup Cohere was valued at $6.8 billion following its latest $500 million funding round, as it seeks to expand its market share in a highly competitive industry of selling AI to enterprises.
The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from existing investors AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments and Salesforce Ventures, among others.
Unlike most AI companies such as OpenAI and Meta's Llama, which are focused on broad foundational models, Cohere builds enterprise-specific AI models.
"The funding allows us to expand more globally, branch off into different modalities, as you saw us launch a command vision model recently, and keep building secure AI for the enterprise," Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere, said in an interview.
Alongside the fundraise, Cohere appointed Joelle Pineau, former vice president of AI Research at Meta , as chief AI officer, and Francois Chadwick, former executive at Uber
Pineau, who was with Meta for eight years and had led Meta's Fundamental AI Research group since 2023, left in May, at a time when the tech giant is aggressively investing and building out a new AI research team.
In January, Cohere launched North, a ChatGPT-style tool designed to help knowledge workers with tasks such as document summarization.
The company said it will use the new funding to advance agentic AI that can help businesses and governments operate more efficiently.
The fundraise comes amid a broader surge in AI financing, as private equity and Big Tech channel capital into startups in pursuit of strong returns from innovative AI products.
(Reporting by Kritika Lamba in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)
