AI startup Cohere has secured a major funding round, raising $500 million at a valuation of $6.8 billion. The company, founded by ex-Google researchers, develops custom AI models for enterprises, including Dell, Notion, and Oracle. Its platform can be deployed in various cloud environments, making it a competitor to other prominent AI companies like OpenAI and Google.
Founded in 2019, Cohere has now raised around $1.5 billion, according to Crunchbase data. The company’s latest funding round was in July 2024, which follows its previous funding rounds in June and February. Cohere also announced two key appointments: Joelle Pineau, a former Meta VP of AI research, as chief AI officer, and Francois Chadwick, former Shield AI CFO, as chief financial officer.
The company’s recent products include generative and retrieval models, as well as its flagship “security-first” agentic AI platform, North. According to a source close to the company, Cohere doubled its annual recurring revenue earlier this year, reaching $100 million in May.
Cohere competes with tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which also sell AI models to enterprises. The AI sector has seen significant venture funding in recent times, with nearly half of U.S. venture funding going to AI-related enterprises last year. According to Crunchbase data, the first quarter of 2025 saw a record $59.6 billion invested in AI ventures globally.
“Cohere is fulfilling its promise by building privacy-first, cloud-agnostic models and agentic AI applications that are driving extraordinary productivity gains and ROI for blue-chip enterprises,” said Jordan Jacobs, co-founder and managing partner of Radical Ventures.
Source: https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/enterprise-genai-startup-unicorn-cohere-raise