In a recent announcement, AI startup Cohere, which focuses on developing an AI model ecosystem for enterprise use, has raised $270 million during its Series C funding round. This impressive financing propels the company's valuation to a notable range of $2.1 to $2.2 billion.
According to TechCrunch, the newly secured capital will be utilized for the continued expansion of Cohere's AI platform. The funds will also accelerate the company's growth and engagement with leading enterprises globally. The platform enables organizations to increase data privacy and simplify implementation through choosing their preferred cloud provider.
Co-founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, Cohere has set itself apart from other generative AI startups by concentrating on enterprise applications. Among their developments is a cutting-edge multilingual language model trained on data from native speakers.
Cohere's AI platform is cloud-agnostic, ensuring it can be deployed within various public clouds, such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, as well as customers' existing clouds, virtual private clouds, or on-premises. In a custom approach, the startup works closely with clients to develop large-language models specifically designed to meet their unique needs, based on proprietary data.
While the exact number of customers working with Cohere remains undisclosed, notable clients include Jasper and HyperWrite, who use the platform for copywriting generation tasks like drafting emails, creating marketing content, and developing product descriptions. Other notable partnerships involve conversational marketing company LivePerson and a variety of organizations such as Salesforce Ventures and news outlets, working to analyze and summarize complex text using machine learning algorithms.
Raising a total of $445 million positions Cohere alongside top generative AI startups such as OpenAI ($11.3 billion) and Anthropic ($450 million) in terms of capital funding. Although AI model training typically demands significant capital, the company remains cautious in selecting their investors, ensuring that their focus remains on direct servicing enterprises, maintaining independence, and providing cloud-agnostic and data-secure solutions.
The future growth opportunities for Cohere lie in areas such as search and retrieval, allowing AI models and chatbots to access up-to-date information from the web relevant to a given query. Beyond that, the company envisions building AI-powered solutions that can execute work for users, like scheduling meetings or filing expense reports. This places them alongside competitors like Adept, Inflection, and OpenAI, who are also working on connecting AI with third-party apps and services.
Despite the competition, Cohere remains confident in their unique positioning as an independent, cloud-agnostic AI platform for enterprises. Their commitment to empowering clients through proprietary large-language models is seen as a significant source of differentiation and business value in the industry.
The recent oversubscribed Series C funding round was led by Inovia Capital and saw participation from major players like Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP, Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, SentinelOne, Thomvest Ventures, and Index Ventures.
