AI startup Cohere is making waves in the industry with its recent announcement of $270 million in a series C round of funding led by Inovia, with participation from tech giants like Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce Ventures. This funding values the company at over $2 billion, and it’s no surprise given the quality of Cohere’s foundation models, which are said to be competitive with the best from Google and OpenAI.
“We are at the beginning of a new era driven by accelerated computing and generative AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, in a statement. “The team at Cohere has made foundational contributions to generative AI. Their service will help enterprises around the world harness these capabilities to automate and accelerate.”
Despite being “crazy under the radar,” as admitted by Cohere AI’s cofounder and CEO Aidan Gomez earlier this year, the company is now firmly in the spotlight. Cohere offers developers and businesses access to natural language processing (NLP) powered by large language models (LLMs), and its enterprise AI suite is cloud-agnostic and built to be deployed inside a customer’s existing cloud environment or virtual private cloud (VPC), or on-site.
Cohere is just one of many companies benefiting from the investment frenzy into generative AI, which has seen Microsoft invest $10 billion into OpenAI and San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic raise $450 million in series C funding. And according to the Wall Street Journal, Cohere had reportedly been in talks with both Google and Nvidia about a possible investment.
Back in 2017, Gomez and a group of fellow Google Brain colleagues founded Cohere after feeling frustrated by the lack of adoption of transformers outside of Google. They wanted to bring down the barriers keeping enterprises and young developers and startup founders from adopting NLP, and Cohere is the result of that mission.
Today, Cohere, a technological startup, has secured $270 million in funding to introduce a new form of artificial intelligence (AI) to businesses. This new form of AI, called generative AI, is designed to reduce manual workloads and automate labour-intensive tasks, providing a more efficient way of working across all industries.
The new funding will be used to develop the AI technology to its fullest potential, and to build a team of experts to help disseminate and customize its use. In doing so, Cohere is setting itself up to provide businesses with automated solutions that can help them work more efficiently.
This new form of AI has the potential to change the way the world works. Generative AI applications are able to perform complex tasks such as natural language processing, image recognition, and machine learning, and can be used to automate mundane tasks, allowing businesses to focus on more valuable tasks.
The introduction of generative AI presents a major challenge to OpenAI, a non-profit AI research organization founded by some of world’s leading tech entrepreneurs. OpenAI has been working on developing its own generative AI technology for some time, and the latest funding from Cohere puts it in competition with the organization.
Generative AI is poised to revolutionize businesses around the world, automate manual processes, and reduce labour costs. As businesses rush to adopt the technology, Cohere’s rapid progress and large funding investment gives it a distinct advantage over OpenAIR.
