Startup Cohere Raises $500 Million for Its AI Model for Enterprises

In the artificial intelligence (AI) model race, news headlines usually congregate around the competition among OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek and xAI. But there are many more startups developing frontier AI models beyond the favored five.

Cohere is one of them. On Thursday (Aug. 14), the Canadian startup announced in a blog post that it has raised $500 million in new funding at a $6.8 billion valuation in an oversubscribed round that included investments from Nvidia, AMD and Salesforce.

Led by Oxford graduate Aidan Gomez as CEO, Cohere said it has hired Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former vice president of AI research, to be its chief AI officer. Cohere has also hired Francois Chadwick as its CFO. Chadwick is a partner at KPMG but spent a decade at Uber including as acting CFO.

Cohere has positioned itself as exclusively selling to businesses, training its models on internal company data and often running AI workloads on company premises rather than in the cloud, according to a Thursday report from the Financial Times.

The AI startup also focuses on security, with Gomez saying in the blog post that this need is “simply not being met by repurposed consumer models.”

However, the startup has fallen into similar legal challenges as its rivals. In February, the News Media Alliance sued Cohere for alleged copyright infringement. The lawsuit said Cohere improperly trained its AI model on at least 4,000 copyrighted works, according to The Wall Street Journal. Cohere told PYMNTS the lawsuit was “misguided and frivolous.”

Meanwhile, the startup continues to bring in enterprise business. Cohere told the FT that it has doubled annual recurring revenue to $100 million in 2025 and aims to reach $200 million by year-end.

Cohere said it is working with Oracle, Dell, RBC, Bell, Fujitsu, LG CNS, SAP and Ensemble Health Partners to deploy its AI models at companies in finance, healthcare, telecom, manufacturing and energy sectors, as well as in the public sector.

On Aug. 6, Cohere launched North, which it describes as a “security-first” agentic AI platform. North integrates Cohere’s generative and search models with workflow automation tools. North is used for private deployments and requires as few as two GPUs. It supports compliance with global standards including GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001.

Cohere said North is being used by clients such as the Royal Bank of Canada, which enables employees to summarize reports, retrieve internal data and generate charts and graphs while keeping data on premises. Dell is integrating North into their AI factory infrastructure, enabling customers to build and run AI agents within their own environments.

Cohere’s funding round was co-led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments, Salesforce Ventures, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan and others.

Read more: Cohere ‘Not Chasing AGI’ as AI Startup’s Value Hits $5 Billion