Cohere has also appointed former Uber executive Francois Chadwick as its CFO.
Canadian AI start-up Cohere has raised $500m at a $6.8bn valuation and hired the former Meta vice-president for AI research Joelle Pineau as its first chief AI officer.
Pineau, a Canadian computer scientist and a professor at McGill University, led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team.
In addition, Cohere has appointed former Uber executive Francois Chadwick as the company’s chief financial officer (CFO). Chadwick, a partner at KPMG US, was the former CFO at Shield AI, a US-based defence tech firm.
Cohere’s oversubscribed half-a-billion-dollar raise was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with additional participation from existing investors including AMD Ventures, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures. Patrick Pichette, a partner at Inovia, is set to join Cohere’s board of directors.
According to the company, the new capital will enable Cohere to accelerate its agentic AI offerings and follows a number of strategic partnerships. The company’s partners includes Oracle, Dell, Bell, Fujitsu and SAP, among others.
Founded in 2019, Cohere offers AI-powered tools to automate tasks across diverse industries. The company competes with US AI giants including OpenAI and Google in developing large language models that underpin the capabilities of these tools.
“Cohere is becoming the world’s chosen partner for integrating AI into their critical industries. We are at a pivotal moment in accelerating the delivery of secure AI that empowers enterprises worldwide, and we’re excited to enter this new phase of expansion alongside our partners,” said Aidan Gomez, the co-founder and CEO of Cohere.
Earlier this year, more than a dozen top news publishers, including Forbes, Condé Nast, Vox, The Guardian and Politico launched a joint lawsuit against Cohere over allegations of “systematic copyright and trademark infringement”.
In their complaint, the publishers accused the company of scraping copies of published articles, training its AI models and using the resulting output to compete with the outlets it ‘stole’ the data from.
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Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere. Image: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Collision via Sportsfile via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
