Cohere Reportedly Valued at 6 Billion USD as Investors Pile into NLP Foundation Models

NLP startup, Cohere, is reported to be raising funding at a multi-billion dollar valuation. Reuters said anonymous sources told the publication that Cohere could soon be valued at more than six billion dollars following the funding round, which is slated to be in the order of hundreds of millions. 

In the article, published on February 6, 2023, Reuters called the news “the latest sign of the investment frenzy around generative AI.” Cohere is widely recognized as a leader in what former Google exec and CEO of paid search engine Neeva, Sridhar Ramaswamy, called foundation models, a category that also includes the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

The topic of generative AI crashed into the mainstream recently amid the huge buzz around ChatGPT and its potential applications. Professionals from multiple industries have been quick to speculate about the possible implications of the technology for their particular domain, while businesses have begun rapidly integrating generative AI in their operations. 

Canada-based Cohere was founded by former Google Brain researchers Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst together with Ivan Zhang. Frosst spoke to Slator in October 2022 when he joined SlatorPod to discuss how Cohere has rapidly scaled from its founding in 2019.

Frosst described Cohere as an NLP company that offers “an API that allows developers to solve any language problem they might have.” He added “if [users] need content generation, semantic search, entity extraction, or classification — those are all things that our API can do. It does all of those powered by large neural networks and state-of-the-art language AI.” 

While Cohere does not offer translation per se, Frosst told Slator, “As our company has grown, it is very obvious that there is a huge space there for multilingual.” He explained, “It would be very cool if you could embed a sentence in one language and find similar sentences in another language or embed a whole document and see where, regardless of language, similar things have been discussed.”

The company previously raised a seed round with Toronto-based AI investors, Radical, a series A with Index, and a series B with Tiger Global.