Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Ontario’s AI developer Cohere on Monday for raising nearly C$690 million in a new funding round. “Canada’s becoming a tech powerhouse! Congrats to Aidan Gomez and the Cohere team,” the nation’s leader said.
To date, Cohere has pooled over C$1.3 billion together to fund its data-security focused machine learning endeavours. Bloomberg says the company is worth almost C$7.6 billion.
Investors and participants from the most recent round included Cisco Systems Inc (Nasdaq: CSCO), Canada’s PSP Investments, Fujitsu Ltd (TYO: 6702), Export Development Canada and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMD). Cohere and Fujitsu entered a strategic partnership agreement last week.
“We continue to significantly expand our technical teams to build the next generations of accurate, data privacy-focused enterprise AI,” Cohere communications manager Josh Gartner told TechCrunch.
Previous investors contributed too, like Salesforce Inc (NYSE: CRM) and NVIDIA Corp (Nasdaq: NVDA).
Larry Ellison’s Oracle Corp (NYSE: ORCL) is known to have a partnership with Cohere and has been a significant funding contributor. “Oracle’s Billion-Dollar Baby,” was one of the most recent headlines regarding the topic. The software giant has integrated Cohere’s AI tech into its programs.
Representatives from the startup’s non-profit research lab, Cohere for AI, are currently at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Austria.
It was a full house day 2 of @icmlconf 2024! 😎 pic.twitter.com/RX260avPJp
— Cohere For AI (@CohereForAI) July 23, 2024
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Cohere gets rid of 20 staff members
Post-funding, Cohere let a cohort of select employees go in a strategic optimization move.
“With our most recent round of financing in place, we have a clear vision for the future of Cohere, which has required some internal realignment,” a representative told CNBC.
This trend isn’t expected to continue as the tech outfit now plans to double its 400-employee headcount by the end of 2024.
“We will continue to aggressively hire people as we work to offer companies the most accurate, secure and private multilingual AI solutions in the market.”
Currently, Cohere generates over C$48 million annually from more than 100 customers. Notion Labs, BambooHR and several others employ the company’s AI services.
Prospective future Cohere customers contributing to Canada’s AI tech industry include companies like Montreal’s Hopper, VERSES AI Inc. (CBOE: VERS) (OTCQB: VRSSF), Toronto’s chip developer Untether AI or the smart thermostat supplier ecobee.
Data security becomes increasingly crucial as a company grows.
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rowan@mugglehead.com