creators

Aidan Gomez: co-founder and CEO of Cohere

Aidan Gomez co-founded Cohere and is its CEO, and co-wrote Attention Is All You Need. Cohere signed a combination agreement with Aleph Alpha in September 2026.

Aidan Gomez is a British-Canadian computer scientist who studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Toronto and did doctoral work at the University of Oxford with Yarin Gal and Yee Whye Teh. In 2017, as a 20-year-old intern at Google Brain, he was one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind most modern large language models. He co-founded Cohere in Toronto in 2019 with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang and has led it since; the company's own site lists him as co-founder and CEO. Cohere builds language models and AI agents sold mainly to enterprise and government customers. Cohere raised $500 million in August 2025 at a $6.8 billion valuation, and a further $100 million a month later at about $7 billion. In April 2026 it announced a combination with the German AI company Aleph Alpha, and on 16 September 2026 the two signed a definitive business combination agreement: the unified company keeps the Cohere name, is dual-headquartered in Berlin and Toronto, expects more than 1,000 employees, and is due to close later in 2026 subject to regulatory approval. Two Aleph Alpha executives join Cohere's leadership when the deal closes — co-chief executive Ilhan Scheer as chief operating officer and co-founder Samuel Weinbach as chief research officer. He was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and was elected to Rivian's board of directors in April 2025.

Specialization

large language models, enterprise AI, transformer architectures

Country

Canada