Cohere

Enterprise-First AI

Founded: 2019 | HQ: Toronto, Canada | Key People: Aidan Gomez (CEO), Ivan Zhang (COO), Nick Chicken (CSO) | Valuation: $20 billion (combined entity, May 2026) | Flagship Models: Command R+, Command R, Aya, Embed, North, North for Pharma

The Origin Story

Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Chicken, all with roots in Toronto's deep AI research community. Gomez's credential is arguably unmatched among AI startup founders: he was a co-author of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” the Google Research publication that introduced the Transformer architecture and became the foundation for virtually every modern language model. After stints at Google Brain and the University of Oxford, Gomez returned to Toronto with a conviction that enterprises needed purpose-built language models rather than adapting consumer technologies for business use. The founding thesis was contrarian in 2019: while the AI world was focused on consumer applications and research demonstrations, Cohere bet that the real value would come from secure, enterprise-grade deployments where organizations could use language AI without sending proprietary data to third-party consumer platforms. The company initially offered API access to large language models before the generative AI boom made such access commonplace, positioning itself as a neutral, enterprise-focused provider at a time when most competitors were chasing consumer attention.

Key Milestones

Cohere raised an initial seed round from investors including Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of deep learning,” providing early credibility. The company's trajectory accelerated with the launch of its Command model family, designed specifically for enterprise tasks like retrieval-augmented generation, search, and document understanding rather than open-ended chat. Command R and Command R+, released in 2024, were purpose-built for RAG workloads with strong multilingual capabilities, supporting 23 languages out of the box. The Aya model family extended Cohere's reach into multilingual AI, covering underserved languages that hyperscaler models often handled poorly. A $270 million Series C in June 2024 valued the company at $5.5 billion, with investors including Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, and Oracle. In August 2025, Cohere raised a $500 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation, followed just one month later by an additional $100 million extension that pushed the valuation to $7 billion, with new investors including AMD and the Business Development Bank of Canada. The company launched North, an enterprise AI platform that uses Cohere models to automate office tasks, signing Royal Bank of Canada and Bell Canada as early customers. A strategic partnership with AMD positioned Cohere as hardware-agnostic, offering deployment on AMD GPUs alongside Nvidia hardware. Cohere surpassed $240 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, beating its $200 million target by 20%, and CEO Aidan Gomez publicly indicated plans for an IPO, describing the company as a “pure play AI investment opportunity.”

The Aleph Alpha Merger

On April 24, 2026, Cohere announced the acquisition of German AI company Aleph Alpha, creating a combined entity valued at approximately $20 billion. The deal was structured as a Cohere acquisition with a 90/10 ownership split, making Aleph Alpha a subsidiary while preserving the German company's brand and Heidelberg operations. The merger created a transatlantic AI powerhouse combining Cohere's North American enterprise presence with Aleph Alpha's deep ties to European government and sovereign AI contracts. Schwarz Group, the German retail giant behind Lidl and a major AI investor, committed $600 million as part of Cohere's Series E round, underscoring the strategic importance of the European AI sovereignty play. The combined entity positions Cohere as the leading non-hyperscaler provider of sovereign AI solutions for governments on both sides of the Atlantic.

Vertical Expansion: Pharma AI

On May 19, 2026, Cohere acquired Reliant AI, a pharmaceutical-focused AI startup, and integrated its capabilities as “North for Pharma.” The acquisition extends Cohere's vertical strategy beyond horizontal enterprise AI, targeting the pharmaceutical industry's growing demand for AI-powered drug discovery, clinical trial analysis, and regulatory compliance workflows. The move reflects a broader trend among enterprise AI vendors to build domain-specific solutions that command premium pricing and deeper customer lock-in.

Current Position

Cohere has transformed from a Canadian enterprise AI startup into a transatlantic platform company valued at $20 billion. The Aleph Alpha merger and Reliant AI acquisition, combined with the Schwarz Group's $600M commitment, signal aggressive expansion beyond pure LLM provision into sovereign AI infrastructure and vertical industry solutions. The $240 million ARR at a $20 billion combined valuation represents a rich multiple, but the strategic breadth — spanning Canadian national champion status, European sovereign AI, and now pharmaceutical AI — provides a more diversified revenue thesis than most AI startups. IPO speculation has intensified following the merger, with Gomez positioning the combined entity as the only credible non-American sovereign AI provider for NATO-allied governments. The competitive threat from hyperscaler AI divisions remains existential, but Cohere's government and regulated-industry positioning creates durable switching costs.

What Leaders Should Know

Cohere is the leading enterprise-first AI vendor for organizations that require data sovereignty, on-premises deployment, and non-American AI infrastructure. The Aleph Alpha merger makes Cohere uniquely positioned to serve both Canadian and European government AI mandates, and the Schwarz Group investment provides deep European industrial credibility. For pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations, North for Pharma represents a purpose-built AI offering from a vendor with strong compliance credentials. With an IPO likely in the near to medium term, early enterprise partnerships carry strategic weight. The primary risk remains scale: even at $20 billion valuation, Cohere is competing against hyperscaler AI divisions with orders of magnitude more resources, and its long-term independence depends on continued differentiation in sovereign and regulated-market AI.