Cohere Secures Additional $100M, Partners with AMD, Emphasizes AI Sovereignty for Enterprise Markets

In a significant development, AI model provider Cohere announced on Wednesday that it has secured an additional $100 million, boosting its valuation to $7 billion. This fundraising extension follows an oversubscribed $500 million round in August, which was initially valued at $6.8 billion.

In a unique turn of events, Cohere has partnered with AMD, one of its investors, marking a departure from the recent high-profile partnership between competitor OpenAI and Nvidia, the leading GPU player. Under this agreement, Cohere’s entire suite of Command AI models, including vision, translation, and reasoning models, can now operate on AMD’s Instinct GPU, a strong competitor to Nvidia GPUs. Moreover, AMD will be using Cohere internally as a client. It is important to note that Cohere continues to support Nvidia GPUs beyond this partnership.

Established in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, one of the authors of the groundbreaking “Transformer” paper that sparked the modern generative AI boom, Cohere initially stood at the forefront of the AI model race. However, in recent times, it has been overshadowed by the rapid ascent of OpenAI and its closest competitor Anthropic. For instance, OpenAI was reported to be valued at a staggering $500 billion last month, while Anthropic achieved an impressive $183 billion valuation earlier this month.

Despite its current standing, Cohere remains firmly focused on the enterprise market. Its strategy now involves marketing itself to enterprises where data and model sovereignty are paramount, ensuring local control rather than ceding it to foreign entities. In line with this approach, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management, known for its Mexico and Iberia funds, were new investors in the latest $100 million round, as per Cohere’s announcement.