NVIDIA leads funding round, Cohere raises $500 million with valuation reaching $6.8 billion

Cohere, a Toronto-based artificial intelligence company specializing in enterprise-grade large language models, has successfully raised $500 million in a new funding round. The round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from major investors including NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. The investment has increased Cohere’s valuation from $5 billion to $6.8 billion. Cohere is known for its “Command” series of language models, with the most advanced version, Command A, launched in March. The company claims its models match the performance of GPT-4 across multiple benchmarks while delivering responses 75% faster. In addition to its language models, Cohere offers embedding models that convert documents and files into compact numerical representations that neural networks can process. Its latest embedding technology can handle multi-modal records and documents up to 200 pages long. Enterprise customers can access Cohere’s models through cloud-based APIs or opt for on-premise deployment, including a secure “air-gapped” configuration that ensures the model runs exclusively within internal infrastructure and never connects to the internet. The company is experiencing rapid growth. According to a report by Information Week, Cohere expects its annualized revenue to exceed $200 million by the end of the year—nearly doubling its revenue projection from February. In conjunction with the funding announcement, Cohere appointed two key executives. Joelle Pineau, a prominent machine learning researcher who previously led Meta’s FAIR research lab, joined as Chief AI Officer. Francois Chadwick, a former executive at Uber, was named Chief Technology Officer. Pineau plans to focus on advancing Cohere’s AI productivity platform, North, which uses AI agents to automate tasks like data synchronization. She also revealed plans to expand Cohere’s AI research team, potentially recruiting machine learning experts from Meta. Chadwick’s appointment signals a strategic shift toward long-term growth and possible future public listing. In the near term, Cohere intends to use the new capital for acquisitions. This comes shortly after the company acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based AI startup that developed an AI agent platform designed to accelerate market research projects. The funding round underscores growing investor confidence in Cohere’s ability to deliver high-performance, secure AI solutions for enterprises. With strong leadership, expanding product capabilities, and a clear path to market expansion, the company is positioning itself as a major player in the competitive AI landscape.