Cohere, an AI foundation model company that competes with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, said it has raised $270 million in a funding round from investors including Nvidia, Oracle and Salesforce Ventures, according to Reuters report.
The announcement confirmed the long-rumored funding for the Toronto-based AI startup, which focuses on building AI models for enterprise customers. Cohere didn’t disclose its valuation, but people familiar with the matter said it is valued at $2.2 billion.
Foundation models are AI systems that are trained on large sets of data, with the ability to learn from new data to perform a variety of tasks. Generative AI aims to make human-like creations through computer code that has processed vast amounts of data.
Cohere, led by former top AI researchers at Alphabet’s Google, has been positioning itself to be a neutral provider for enterprises to use models that are not tied to cloud providers like Microsoft.
“We’re independent. We did not and we would not take a huge check from a single company, especially not a huge check from a single cloud provider, because we think that would constrain us from doing the right things for our business and our enterprise customers,” Martin Kon, president at Cohere, said.
Cohere will use the fresh funding for purchasing computing resources and hiring, Kon said.
Cohere’s funding was led by Canada’s Inovia Capital and joined by other investors such as DTCP, Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, SentinelOne and Thomvest Ventures.
