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Artificial intelligence startup Cohere is seeking more than $500 million in new funding and is aiming to catch up with extremely expensive races to build cutting-edge AI models alongside rivals such as Openai, Google and Anthropic.
The Canadian startup is roughly similar to the price it received from last year’s previous funding round, according to two people with debate knowledge.
Another person who knows directly from the discussion said the figure could reach between $6 billion and $6.5 billion, but warned that talks are in the early stages.
Such a deal would put it among the most valuable startups on the field, but talks suggest that Cole fell behind its US competitors, which have risen in comparison.
In April, Openai secured a valuation of $300 million from $157 billion in 2024, but humanity’s latest funding round tripled to $61.5 billion in March.
Cohere was founded by former Google researchers, including CEO Aidan Gomez. He was co-author of Google’s inventive “All Attention Needs” research paper, and introduced the concept of The Transformer, an AI architecture that underpins all large-scale language models.
Unlike its competitors, Cohere has not launched any consumer apps, establishing itself as a more focused challenger with Openai and humanity’s focus on business and privacy.
Cohere is driving the creation of “open” models that developers can access and build, such as the AYA family of multilingual models. However, the company has entered a crowded market with meta and startup mistral and deepseek alternatives.
Cohere founders Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang are fighting for lucrative company contracts with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
The company has also doubled its annual recurring revenue over the past four months, exceeding $100 million last month, according to someone close to Cohere.
“Many of the consumer adoptions happened very quickly,” the person said. “The enterprises tend to be slower adoption, but they are more sticky in terms of users. Companies are not known to adopt technology early.”
Development of powerful AI models requires enormous amounts of money to train the models and pay for computing power. Almost three years after Openai’s ChatGPT kicked off the AI boom, investors are keen to see the multi-billion dollar returns invested in Hot AI model makers.
Co-Here’s new challenger is building buzzy AI startups that build applications on top of AI models, such as Anysphere, the coding company behind the popular coding tool cursor. These startups have attracted the attention of enthusiastic investors and generate months of revenue in just a few months. Earlier this year, Anysphere was valued at $2.5 billion.
Cohere also introduced North, a platform that allows businesses to build AI agents for office work, but only available to a limited number of customers.
