
Harvest Communications
Jun 7, 2024
Google-linked Generative AI Startup worth $2Billion in Funding Round
June 4 (Reuters) - Canadian AI startup Cohere has raised $450 million in funding from returning investors such as Nvidia (NVDA.O), and Salesforce Ventures (CRM.N), as well as new investors including Cisco (CSCO.O), and Canadian pension fund PSP Investments, according to a source familiar the matter.
This concludes the first tranche of Cohere's months-long fundraising efforts, while the company is still in talks to raise more in the same round at $5 billion valuation, added the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Salesforce, a major provider of web-based software, Nvidia, the Toronto-based venture capital firm Inovia Capital, and the Silicon Valley-based firm Index Ventures are among the investors. A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Pieter Abbeel, as well as Index, Tiger Global, and other investors, contributed $170 million to the startup.
One of the most high-profile Canadian startups, Cohere is likely to benefit from the Canadian government's plan to invest C$2.4 billion ($1.77 billion) to fund compute and AI research for homegrown AI companies.
Founded in 2019, Toronto-headquartered Cohere builds large language models - software systems that are trained on large amounts of data and can generate text. Unlike OpenAI's tie-up with Microsoft, it has steered clear of exclusive deals with cloud providers, despite being backed by Oracle (ORCL.N). Cohere builds technology that other businesses can use to deploy chatbots, search engines and other A.I.-driven products. It is among a small group of companies — including the tech industry’s giants and a handful of start-ups — that are building technology that could rival systems under development at OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that kicked off the generative A.I. boom in November with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT.
Cohere was set out to raise between $500 million to $1 billion, Reuters previously reported.
Foundation model AI companies have been racing to raise capital to fund the expensive development of AI models that require huge amounts of computing power and top industry talent.