A startup from Canada, Cohere, raised $500 million at a valuation of $5.5 billion, becoming one of the most expensive AI companies in the world. Bloomberg writes about this.
The Series D round was led by pension savings management company PSP Investments with the participation of Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, AMD Ventures and EDC. Cohere's valuation has more than doubled after raising $270 million about a year ago.
We’re excited to announce our Series D financing to accelerate growth, expand our team, & develop our next class of frontier, enterprise-grade, data privacy-focused AI technology.
We’re bringing highly scalable and secure AI solutions to global enterprises wherever their data is… pic.twitter.com/0qJS9eFneU
"We are pleased to announce Series D funding to accelerate growth, expand the team and develop a new generation of advanced enterprise-grade AI technologies focused on data privacy," Cohere said in a statement.
Founded in 2019, the company is engaged in the creation of large language models — software trained on a massive amount of data from the Internet. The company's products are focused on the corporate segment. Cohere software is used by hundreds of clients like Notion Labs and Oracle to write texts for websites, communicate with users and add generative AI to their solutions
Unlike competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, Cohere does not seek to create general artificial intelligence (AGI). Instead, the startup develops software for companies that helps them work more efficiently.
"We are not chasing AGI. We are trying to create models that can be effectively launched at the enterprise to solve real problems," said Nick Frost, co—founder of the company.
In April, Cohere released its flagship AI model, Command R+, which is "designed to handle enterprise-level workloads."
Recall that in 2022, the media learned about Google's desire to invest in Cohere.
In May, OpenAI introduced the latest chatbot model, GPT-4o.