Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst. Gomez was a co-author of the landmark “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the Transformer architecture — the foundation of modern LLMs. The company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
Unlike consumer-facing AI companies, Cohere has focused squarely on the enterprise market. Their language models — including Command (for text generation) and Embed (for embeddings and search) — are designed to be deployed in business environments with strict data privacy requirements. Cohere offers cloud deployment, private cloud, and on-premises options.
The company raised over $500 million in funding, including a $270 million Series C in 2023 at a valuation of approximately $2.2 billion. Investors include Inovia Capital, Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce Ventures. Cohere has partnerships with Oracle Cloud and other enterprise platforms to deliver AI capabilities where corporate data already lives.
Cohere’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities are a key differentiator. Their models can ground responses in specific documents and data sources, which reduces hallucinations and makes outputs more trustworthy for business applications. They also support over 100 languages, making them particularly attractive for global enterprises. For companies that need AI but can’t send their data to a third-party API, Cohere offers a practical path forward.
