news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Cailianshe News, July 23 (Editor: Bian Chun)According to media reports,Canadian AI startup Cohere raises $500 million in latest funding round, boosting valuation to $5.5 billion, becoming one of the world's most valuable startups in the field. The financing strengthens its ability to compete with competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, all of whom are alumni of the University of Toronto. Aidan Gomez previously worked at Google and was the co-author of a landmark paper in the field of artificial intelligence research in 2017, "Attention is All You Need," which promoted the advancement of computer analysis and generation of text.

The company is currently competing fiercely with other larger rivals for lucrative contracts with companies that are scrambling to incorporate artificial intelligence into their businesses.

Josh Gartner, a Cohere spokesman, said the money "will be used for new models, computing power and headcount. This will continue our momentum."

The company plans to double its workforce to about 500 this year.

The latest financing comes from new and old investors, including Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and Fujitsu.

The company was valued at $2.2 billion in June last year, less than half of what it is now, highlighting the rapid growth of the artificial intelligence industry.

According to people familiar with Cohere's development, the company's annualized revenue reached $35 million in March this year, almost three times the $13 million it aims to achieve by the end of 2023.

Unlike its larger competitors, Cohere does not develop AI chatbots for consumers, but provides customized generative AI services for enterprise customers. The company focuses on optimizing AI models, building, training, and running large language models at a lower cost to meet the specific needs of enterprise customers.

Cohere is still far smaller than OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised more than $10 billion since 2019, and raised more than $7 billion in a funding spree between 2023 and this year, with a valuation of nearly $20 billion.