Who is Cohere, the discreet rising star of AI, which has just raised $500 million ?

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The start-up Cohere, specializing in generative artificial intelligence (AI), has just raised $500 million. A considerable sum which will allow it to accelerate the development of its models for businesses.

Models meeting the specific needs of businesses

Because unlike the flagships of the sector like OpenAI or Anthropic, Cohere does not target the general public but rather professional users. Founded in 2019 by three former Google researchers, Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, the start-up is based in Toronto, Canada.

Gomez, CEO of Cohere, is a prominent figure in the world of AI. In 2017, he co-authored a technical article laying the foundations for many of today's most successful generative AI models, such as GPT-4o. For its part, Cohere collaborates with its clients to create tailor-made models based on their proprietary data. Objective: allow them to operate more efficiently with AI adapted to their specific needs.

« We are not looking for artificial general intelligence (Editor's note: an AI capable of competing with human intelligence in a variety of complex tasks). We're trying to create models that can be used effectively in a business to solve real-world problems,” Nick Frosst tells Bloomberg. Its client catalog already includes some great people, like Oracle, Notion or Spotify.

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Cohere is valued at 5 billion

One of Cohere’s strengths lies in the flexibility of its platform. It is not tied to a single cloud provider or specific infrastructure. Concretely, it can be deployed through providers such as Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as in the customer's existing cloud infrastructure.

The start- up also operates a non-profit research laboratory. This publishes open models for understanding and analyzing texts. Thanks to this new fundraising, Cohere sees its valuation double compared to June 2023 to around $5 billion. Further proof of the industry's extreme enthusiasm for generative AI, with sometimes colossal sums injected into its development. Funding from OpenAI or Anthropic bears witness to this.

Cohere now aims to design even more sophisticated models. These funds will be necessary to make this happen, as the cost of developing AI is incredibly high. “ In the future, while continuing our model-as-a-service business, we will begin to focus more and more on increasing the workforce through AI and sophisticated task automation ,” says Aidan Gomez in a note shared to his employees.

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