Generative A.I. Start-Up Cohere Valued at About $2 Billion in Funding Round
Toronto artificial intelligence startup Cohere has raised $250 million in a new round of funding, two people familiar with the matter said.
The deal is valued at about $2 billion for Coheer, according to people familiar with the matter. Investors include internet software giant Salesforce, chip maker Nvidia, Toronto venture capital firm Inovia Capital, and Silicon Valley firm Index Ventures.
Founded in 2019, the startup has raised $170 million from investors including Index, Tiger Global, and renowned AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Pieter Abbeel.
Cohere builds technology that other companies can use to deploy chatbots, search engines, and other AI-driven products. The company is one of a handful of companies, including tech giants and a handful of startups, building technology that rivals systems in development at OpenAI, a San Francisco startup that kicked off the generative AI boom in November. It’s one. With the release of the chatbot ChatGPT.
Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, two Canadian researchers who worked on artificial intelligence at Google, and Toronto entrepreneur Ivan Zhang. Gomez was one of Google’s researchers who published a significant research paper leading to ChatGPT and similar technologies.
ChatGPT has captured the imagination of millions with its ability to answer questions, write term papers and poetry, and generate computer code. As chatbots have grown in popularity, the tech industry has turned to generative artificial intelligence — technology that can generate text, images, and other media in response to short prompts.
Many companies are exploring the fringes of this new field, but only a few have the resources to build the technology from scratch. These companies have an unusual combination of experienced researchers, enormous ambitions, and large amounts of funding.
Investors are reluctant to fund other startups, but are pouring money into a handful of companies at the forefront of generative AI.
In February, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, bringing its total investment in the company to $13 billion. And in March, Character.ai, another startup that builds online chatbots, raised $150 million in a funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to his $1 billion. bottom.
After more than a decade of research within companies like OpenAI, generative AI companies are poised to reinvent everything from internet search engines like Microsoft Bing to digital tutors.
