(Reuters) -Cohere was valued at $6.8 billion after its latest $500 million funding round, as the artificial intelligence startup moves to expand its market share in a highly competitive industry.
The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from existing investors AMD Ventures, NVIDIA, PSP Investments, and Salesforce Ventures, among others.
Unlike most AI companies like OpenAI and Meta’s Llama, which are focused on broad foundational models, Cohere builds enterprise-specific AI models.
In January, it launched North, a ChatGPT-style tool designed to help knowledge workers with tasks such as document summarization.
The company said it will use the new funding to advance agentic AI that can help businesses and governments operate more efficiently.
Alongside the fundraise, Cohere appointed Joelle Pineau, former Vice President of AI Research at Meta, as Chief AI Officer, and Francois Chadwick, former CFO at Uber and Shield AI, as Chief Financial Officer.
The fundraise comes amid a broader surge in AI financing, as private equity and Big Tech channel capital into startups in pursuit of strong returns from innovative AI products.
(Reporting by Kritika Lamba in Bengaluru)
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