Cohere

Cohere is a global technology company that specialises in enterprise-grade AI, with a focus on data security. Founded in 2019, it is co-headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, with additional offices in London and New York. Cohere builds AI models designed for real-world business applications, offering multilingual capabilities and cloud-agnostic deployment, ensuring data security and privacy. Its solutions can be deployed on-premises or in private clouds, meeting the needs of businesses regardless of where their data is stored.

The company offers three core AI products: Command r, Embed, and Rerank. The command r provides generative AI capabilities for writing, analysing documents, and creating conversational agents. Embed is used for semantic search, classification, and clustering by transforming text into machine-readable formats. Rerank improves the quality of search results by reordering them based on relevance. These tools are designed to help businesses generate, search, and categorise information more effectively.

For business users, Cohere provides AI solutions that support tasks like product description writing, document summarisation, and customer service automation. The company partners with leading organisations, including Salesforce, Oracle, and Accenture, integrating its models into their applications for tasks like chatbots and enterprise search systems.

For developers, Cohere offers API access to its models through platforms like Amazon SageMaker, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. These APIs enable businesses to integrate Cohere’s AI capabilities into their applications. Cohere also provides extensive documentation, a developer playground, and courses through its LLM University, which is designed to help developers quickly learn how to build with its AI models.

Cohere is also committed to advancing AI research through its nonprofit arm, Cohere For AI. This research lab focuses on solving complex machine-learning problems and offers support to independent researchers. The company has developed Aya, a multilingual AI model designed to improve language processing across 101 languages. Cohere's research community includes scholars, linguists, and engineers from over 100 countries, collaborating to push the boundaries of AI research.

Cohere has secured significant funding, including $500 million in Series D financing, bringing its valuation to $5.5 billion. Major investors include Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu. Cohere aims to continue expanding its enterprise AI offerings, focusing on secure, scalable, and private deployment options for its clients.

Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst. All three founders had previous experience in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), with Gomez and Frosst working at Google Brain and Zhang researching at FOR.ai. Their goal was to create a company that focused on enterprise-level AI, specialising in large language models designed to improve how businesses interact with and manage their data. Cohere is co-headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, with additional offices in London and New York.

Cohere's development gained early momentum with the use of the transformer architecture, which Gomez co-authored in the groundbreaking paper "Attention Is All You Need" in 2017 while at Google. This architecture became the foundation for many of Cohere's models, which are now designed for large-scale natural language processing tasks in various languages. In November 2021, Google Cloud announced a partnership with Cohere, providing the infrastructure to support the development and deployment of Cohere's AI models using Google’s TPUs. This partnership allowed Cohere to scale its operations quickly and provide cloud-based AI solutions to businesses.

In June 2022, Cohere expanded its focus to include open-source research by launching Cohere For AI, a nonprofit research lab aimed at solving complex machine learning challenges and contributing to fundamental research. This initiative is led by Sara Hooker, a former Google Brain researcher, and includes a global community of independent researchers from over 100 countries. The lab works on advancing natural language understanding and multilingual AI development. Aya, one of its key models, supports over 100 languages and is designed to improve language accessibility in AI systems.

In December 2022, Cohere released a new multilingual model capable of processing over 100 languages. This release marked a significant milestone as it allowed enterprises to search for documents and data by meaning, rather than relying solely on keyword matching. Cohere’s models became popular among businesses looking to deploy AI-driven solutions, such as chatbots, content generation tools, and data classification systems. These models were integrated into platforms like Salesforce and Oracle products, helping to improve search and customer service capabilities.

By June 2023, Cohere had entered a significant partnership with Oracle, integrating its AI solutions into Oracle’s business applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud and NetSuite. Around the same time, McKinsey also partnered with Cohere to help organisations integrate AI into their business operations. These collaborations boosted Cohere’s position in the enterprise AI market.

In July 2023, Cohere introduced Command R+, a scalable language model optimised for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) use cases, further enhancing its product portfolio. Additionally, Cohere launched Aya 23, an open-weight research model aimed at advancing multilingual generative AI, with support for 23 languages. This model was released to enable researchers and developers to work on a wide range of NLP tasks.

To support developers and professionals working with language models, Cohere also launched LLM University, an educational platform offering resources, courses, and step-by-step guides to help developers quickly learn how to use large language models (LLMs) in various applications. LLM University covers essential topics like text generation, semantic search, prompt engineering, and deployment, making it easier for developers to integrate Cohere’s models into their own business processes.

In September 2023, Cohere was one of 15 tech companies that agreed to a set of voluntary measures initiated by the White House, aimed at ensuring the safe and responsible development of artificial intelligence. The company also signed Canada’s voluntary code of conduct for AI, further aligning itself with ethical AI development.

Cohere raised $500 million in Series D funding in July 2024, bringing its total valuation to $5.5 billion. This funding was led by major investors including Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu. The company’s latest work focuses on expanding its suite of AI products, including its Command, Embed, and Rerank models, which are designed to address enterprise needs for secure, scalable, and cloud-agnostic AI solutions. Cohere continues to be a leader in natural language processing, offering AI models that are capable of working across multiple languages and industries.

At present, Cohere is focused on further developing its enterprise-grade AI offerings, ensuring its models can be deployed across a variety of platforms while maintaining high levels of data security and privacy. Its ongoing partnerships with Oracle, Salesforce, and McKinsey ensure that Cohere's technology remains embedded in some of the most widely used enterprise systems globally. Additionally, the company continues to support open-source AI research through its nonprofit arm, Cohere For AI, contributing to the wider AI and machine learning community.

Cohere’s mission is to empower businesses with advanced AI solutions that enhance how they work with language data. The company focuses on building secure, scalable, and enterprise-grade AI models that solve real-world business challenges. By providing cloud-agnostic AI tools, Cohere aims to meet businesses where their data is stored, ensuring the highest levels of security and privacy. Cohere’s products, such as generative AI, search, and data retrieval models, are designed to help organisations operate more efficiently and effectively, making language AI accessible and beneficial to businesses across industries.

Cohere envisions a future where businesses can seamlessly harness the power of AI to process and understand language data across any platform, without technical limitations or concerns over security. The company strives to lead in multilingual AI development, ensuring that organisations can work with data in any language and from any source. Through its ongoing research and commitment to innovation, Cohere aims to create AI models that are not only effective but also ethical and responsible, enabling businesses to thrive while maintaining control over their data and privacy.

Cohere offers a range of AI-powered products and services designed to help businesses manage, analyse, and generate language data effectively. These tools are built on large language models and are tailored to meet the specific needs of enterprises, ensuring data security, scalability, and easy integration into existing workflows. Cohere's solutions are designed to improve search, generation, classification, and retrieval of information, providing companies with efficient ways to handle their data.

• Command: Cohere’s Command is a family of scalable language models that businesses can use to perform a wide variety of language-related tasks. These models are particularly useful for generating content, such as product descriptions, blog posts, marketing copy, emails, and more. They can also analyse and summarise documents, making them helpful for businesses looking to quickly process large volumes of information.
• Command is also designed to work with conversational agents or chatbots, enabling businesses to offer customer service that is both responsive and grounded in their company’s knowledge base. This helps improve customer interactions and streamline processes.
• Embed: Embed is Cohere’s leading product for text representation, which is used for tasks like semantic search, classification, and clustering. Instead of relying on keyword-based search methods, Embed allows businesses to search documents and data by meaning. This makes it easier to find relevant information even when keywords are not an exact match.
• Embed is also used in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, where it improves the accuracy and relevance of data retrieval. For businesses with large volumes of text data, Embed helps categorise and group similar documents, making it easier to uncover patterns and insights.
• Rerank: Rerank is designed to enhance the quality of search results by reordering them based on relevance. It works with both keyword-based and vector search systems, providing a semantic boost to search precision. This product is useful for businesses that rely on search functionality within their websites, customer service systems, or data management platforms.
• Rerank can be easily integrated with existing systems like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, offering improved search accuracy without requiring a complete overhaul of a company’s current infrastructure. By improving search precision, Rerank saves time and reduces the frustration of finding relevant information in large datasets.
• Custom AI Solutions: In addition to its core products, Cohere offers custom AI solutions tailored to the specific needs of a business. These solutions can be deployed on any cloud platform, such as Amazon SageMaker, Google Cloud, or Oracle Cloud, or directly within a business’s private infrastructure. This flexibility allows companies to integrate Cohere’s AI tools with their systems while maintaining full control over data security and privacy.
• Cohere also offers fine-tuning of its models, allowing businesses to customise AI solutions for their unique industry or use case. This ensures that the models are optimised for specific tasks, such as customer service, document processing, or product generation.
• Developer Tools: For developers, Cohere provides API access to its models, allowing businesses to easily integrate Cohere’s AI capabilities into their own applications. Developers can use Cohere’s playground to test and experiment with AI models before deploying them, while detailed documentation and guides are available to help with the integration process.
• Cohere also offers courses through its LLM University, which is designed to teach developers how to work with large language models, build AI-powered applications, and improve their understanding of prompt engineering, semantic search, and retrieval-augmented generation.