Cohere

Overview

Cohere is a Canadian enterprise-AI company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, one of the co-authors of the seminal 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, alongside Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst (both ex-Google Brain).

Enterprise positioning

Unlike consumer-facing rivals, Cohere has focused exclusively on enterprise customers, particularly in regulated industries such as banking, telecommunications, and government. Cohere offers private-deployment options across all major clouds and on-premises.

Models

• Command (2023) — generative LLM family
• Command R / R+ (2024) — RAG-optimised models with strong tool-use
• Command A (2025) — current flagship, 256K context
• Embed — text embedding models, top of MTEB benchmarks
• Rerank — search-result reranking model
• Aya — multilingual research model (101 languages)

North

In 2024, Cohere launched North, an enterprise AI workspace that combines retrieval, reasoning, and tool-use into a Slack-style interface for knowledge workers.

Funding

Cohere has raised over US$1 billion across multiple rounds, with strategic investments from NVIDIA, Salesforce, and Cisco, valuing the company at US$5.5 billion in 2024.