Cohere, a Toronto, Canada-based AI startup building technology that businesses can use to deploy chatbots, search engines, and other AI-driven products, secured $250 million in fresh funding.
Investors in the round include the internet software giant Salesforce, the chip maker Nvidia, the Toronto venture capital firm Inovia Capital, and the Silicon Valley firm Index Ventures.
With this funding round, Cohere is looking to bolster its position in the crowded AI sector, where it faces competition from deep-pocketed companies such as Microsoft.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Aidan Gomez, said Cohere would not compete directly with OpenAI. “We won’t offer a consumer offering, we won’t compete with ChatGPT in that sense. They are very focused on consumer deployment, and we’re much more focused on the enterprise,” he said.
The company has already teamed up with Spotify to improve podcast recommendations and search and with AI copywriting company Jasper. Cohere is competing with tech industry giants and a handful of other start-ups in building technology that could rival systems under development at OpenAI.
Company: Cohere Inc.
Raised: $250.0M
Round: Unknown
Funding Month: May 2023
Lead Investors:
Additional Investors: Salesforce, Nvidia, Inovia Capital, and Index Ventures
Company Website: https://cohere.com/
Software Category: Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform
About the Company: Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, Cohere is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform provider. Its cutting-edge large language models are built on Transformer architecture and trained on supercomputers, providing NLP solutions that don’t need expensive ML development. The company empowers every developer and enterprise to build amazing products and capture true business value with language AI. Its mission is to build machines that understand the world and to make them safely accessible to all.
Source: https://techfundingnews.com/another-chatgpt-rival-alert-cohere-fills-its-war-chest-with-250m-for-its-ai-tool/