Generative AI startup Cohere announced Thursday that it has raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation.
The news confirms an early June report that the company was seeking to raise over $500 million at a valuation of more than $5.5 billion.
Inovia Capital and Radical Ventures co-led the round, which included participation from AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments, Salesforce Ventures 1, and others.
Founded by ex-Google researchers, Toronto-based Cohere is just one of many companies developing innovative AI models. It competes with the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. However, it has not created a consumer-facing app. Instead, it builds custom AI models that perform tasks such as writing website copy and powering chatbots for enterprises including Dell, Notion and Oracle.
As its platform is cloud-agnostic, Cohere can be deployed inside public clouds, virtual private clouds, a customer’s own cloud, or on-site.
Since its 2019 inception, Cohere has now raised about $1.5 billion, according to Crunchbase data. Other backers include Alumni Ventures, Index Ventures, Radical Ventures and SentinelOne. Its most recent funding round was in July 2024, when it raised a $500 million Series D.
Cohere also announced Thursday that it has tapped Joelle Pineau, a former VP of AI research at Meta, to serve as its “chief AI officer,” and Francois Chadwick, former CFO of Shield AI, to serve as its chief financial officer.
The company noted that over the past year, it has released a “suite” of new enterprise-grade AI products, including generative and retrieval models and its flagship “security-first” agentic AI platform, North.
AI funding momentum continues
One of Cohere’s co-founders is Aidan Gomez, who co-authored Google’s “Attention is All You Need,” a technical paper believed to have laid the foundation for many of today’s most capable generative AI models.
According to a source familiar with Cohere’s operations who wished to remain anonymous, the company doubled its annual recurring revenue earlier this year, crossing the $100 million mark in May. Cohere also competes with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which also sell AI models to enterprises.
In recent times, artificial intelligence startups have been getting the largest share of venture funding. Over the past year, nearly half of U.S. venture funding went to AI-related enterprises, Crunchbase data shows. AI dominates globally as well. Per Crunchbase’s global funding report, AI was the leading sector for venture funding in Q1 2025, with $59.6 billion invested. The first quarter also came in as the strongest for AI funding ever, with a staggering 53% of global funding going to the AI sector alone.
“We have been proud investors and partners with Cohere and its founders since day one, with a vision to deliver leading AI for business,” said Jordan Jacobs, co-founder and managing partner of Radical Ventures, in a written statement. “Cohere is fulfilling that promise by building privacy-first, cloud-agnostic models and agentic AI applications that are driving extraordinary productivity gains and ROI to blue-chip enterprises, businesses and governments worldwide.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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