Enterprise AI model developer Cohere has secured an additional $100 million in funding, elevating its valuation to $7 billion. This capital infusion serves as an extension to an oversubscribed $500 million financing round announced in August, which had valued the company at $6.8 billion, Cohere stated on Wednesday.
Concurrently with the funding announcement, Cohere disclosed a strategic partnership with chipmaker AMD, which is also an investor in the AI firm. Under the agreement, Cohere's full Command-family AI models—encompassing vision, translate, and reasoning capabilities—will now be compatible with AMD's Instinct GPU hardware. Furthermore, AMD intends to deploy Cohere's solutions internally as a customer. Cohere clarified that this partnership does not preclude continued support for Nvidia GPUs, according to statements made to TechCrunch.
Cohere was co-founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, a co-author of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which introduced the transformer architecture foundational to modern generative AI. The company has historically focused on the enterprise market, aiming to provide AI solutions tailored for business applications.
Despite its rapid ascent to a $7 billion valuation within six years, Cohere operates in a highly competitive and dynamic AI landscape. Recent reports indicate significantly higher valuations for competitors such as OpenAI, which was reportedly valued at $500 billion last month, and Anthropic, which achieved a reported $183 billion valuation earlier this month. In response to market dynamics, Cohere is increasingly targeting enterprises that prioritize "AI sovereignty"—the ability to maintain local control over their data and models rather than relying on external entities.
The latest $100 million funding round saw participation from new investors, including the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management, known for its investment funds in Mexico and the Iberian Peninsula, Cohere confirmed. This financing round underscores ongoing investor interest in the enterprise AI sector.
