Cohere Trying To Raise Another $500M As AI Race Speeds Up

Cohere, a generative AI startup, is seeking to raise over $500 million at a valuation of more than $5.5 billion, according to Financial Times.

One source pegged the company’s potential valuation to reach as high as between $6 billion and $6.5 billion.

Founded by ex-Google researchers, Toronto-based Cohere is just one of many companies developing innovative AI models. It competes with the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. However, it has not created a consumer-facing app. Instead, it builds custom AI models, which do things like write website copy and power chatbots for enterprises such as Dell, Notion and Oracle.

As its platform is cloud-agnostic, Cohere can be deployed inside public clouds, virtual private clouds, a customer’s own cloud, or onsite.

Since its 2019 inception, Cohere has raised about $1.1 billion, according to Crunchbase data. Backers include Nvidia, Alumni Ventures, Index Ventures, Radical Ventures and SentinelOne. Its last funding round was in July 2024, when it raised a $500 million Series D.

One of Cohere’s co-founders is Aidan Gomez, who co-authored Google’s “Attention is All You Need,” ​​a technical paper believed to have laid the foundation for many of today’s most capable generative AI models.

According to an unnamed FT source, Cohere has doubled its annual recurring revenue in the past four months, crossing the $100 million mark in May. The company also competes with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which also sell AI models to enterprises.

In recent times, artificial intelligence startups have been getting the largest share of venture funding. Over the past year, nearly half of U.S. venture funding went to AI-related enterprises, Crunchbase data shows. AI dominates globally as well. Per Crunchbase’s global funding report, AI was the leading sector for venture funding in Q1 2025, with $59.6 billion invested. The first quarter also came in as the strongest for AI funding ever, with a staggering 53% of global funding going to the AI sector alone.

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