companies

Cohere

Toronto-based enterprise AI company building large language models and retrieval tools for businesses; co-founded by a co-author of the original Transformer paper.

Cohere was founded in 2019 in Toronto, Canada, by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst. Gomez was a co-author of the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" Transformer paper, and the company focuses on building large language models for enterprise use. Cohere's key products include the Command family of language models, Embed for text embeddings, and Rerank for search relevance, alongside the North platform for enterprise generative AI deployment. It also supports Cohere Labs (formerly Cohere For AI), an independent nonprofit research lab. Cohere raised funding through multiple rounds, including a $270 million Series C in June 2023 backed by Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce, a $500 million round in 2025 led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, and an additional $100 million later that year, reaching a valuation of roughly $7 billion. In April 2026, Cohere announced a planned merger with Germany's Aleph Alpha, structured as a combined acquisition and Series E funding round anchored by a $600 million commitment from Schwarz Group, aiming to create a roughly $20 billion transatlantic AI company; the deal remained subject to regulatory approval as of mid-2026. Aidan Gomez continues as CEO, with Martin Kon as President & COO.

Founded

2019

Headquarters

Toronto, Canada

Sector

lab