Canadian AI company Cohere has closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the company at $6.8 billion. The capital will be used to accelerate global expansion and the development of advanced, secure AI solutions for businesses and governments. The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital with additional participation from existing investors including AMD Ventures, NVIDIA, PSP Investments, and Salesforce Ventures.
The new investment enables Cohere to sharpen its focus on “agentic AI” solutions. These AI systems are designed to automate routine tasks, freeing up employees to focus on the more complex and creative aspects of their work. According to the company, this involves a strict emphasis on data security and digital sovereignty, which Cohere believes is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models.
“Cohere is becoming the world’s chosen partner for integrating AI into their critical industries. We are at a pivotal moment in accelerating the delivery of secure AI that empowers enterprises worldwide, and we’re excited to enter this new phase of expansion alongside our partners,” said Aidan Gomez, Co-founder and CEO of Cohere.
Apart from the capital injection, Cohere has also added two key executives to the team:
Joelle Pineau will be joining as Chief AI Officer to advance our cutting-edge research and product development.
François Chadwick will be joining as Chief Financial Officer to oversee finance and business operations as we accelerate growth to serve our expanding global customer base.
Joelle is a highly respected leader in the AI industry and will be based in our Montréal office. She is a Professor at the School of Computer Science at McGill University and as a core member of Mila, the Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute. She was previously Meta’s VP of AI Research, leading its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team.
François is a proven finance and technology executive who will be based in our San Francisco office. He has held key corporate leadership roles, including serving as Uber’s acting CFO, helping scale finance operations globally and playing a leadership role during the company’s IPO. François most recently rejoined KPMG, advising high-growth tech companies, after serving as CFO at Shield AI.
The funding follows a year of strong growth for Cohere, marked by strategic partnerships with global leaers, including Oracle, Dell, RBC, Bell, Fujitsu, LG CNS, SAP. The company also expanded its product portfolio with the launch of “North,” its flagship platform for agentic AI, and the introduction of new generative models (Command A and Command A Vision) and retrieval models (Embed 4 and Rerank 3.5).
“We have been proud investors and partners with Cohere and its founders since day one, with a vision to deliver leading AI for business. Cohere is fulfilling that promise by building privacy-first, cloud-agnostic models and agentic AI applications that are driving extraordinary productivity gains and ROI to blue-chip enterprises, businesses and governments worldwide. We are co-leading this investment round because this is just the beginning for Cohere,” said Jordan Jacobs, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Radical Ventures.
With this investment, Cohere’s ambition is to accelerate its global expansion and build the next generation of secure enterprise and sovereign AI solutions.
