Cohere is a Canadian startup founded in 2019 to make artificial intelligence accessible and useful for real businesses. Instead of building flashy consumer chat apps, Cohere focuses on safe, private AI systems that companies can run in their own secure environments.
If you want to learn what Cohere is, who is behind it, how it is different from other AI players, and whether it is worth your attention, you are in the right place.
This guide brings together the latest facts, product details, and expert coverage, so by the end, you’ll have a clear, practical understanding of the Cohere startup and its place in today’s AI landscape.
What is Cohere?
Cohere was founded in Toronto by Aidan Gomez (one of the researchers of the famous Transformer paper), Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang. Presently, the company works across multiple cities, including San Francisco, London, and New York. Its primary goal is to help organizations utilize advanced language models without compromising sensitive data.
Recently, Cohere raised $500 million in funding, valuing the company at $6.8 billion. This significant investment shows how much trust investors have in Cohere’s approach to private, business-focused AI.
What Does Cohere Offer?
Cohere’s products can be divided into two parts:
1. Models: These are the engines that power tasks like text generation, summarization, and search. Cohere’s most popular models are:
- Command: Text-generation models for writing, summarizing, or answering questions.
- Aya: Multilingual models that can understand and respond in many languages.
- Embed & Rerank: Tools that improve enterprise search by finding the most relevant results before a model answers.
2. Platform: Cohere recently launched North, a workspace where businesses can create AI “agents.” These agents can handle multi-step jobs, such as analyzing documents or automating workflows, while remaining within the company’s secure system.
Why Do Businesses Care About Cohere?
For most companies, privacy is a huge concern. They do not want to feed their confidential information into public chatbots. Cohere solves this problem by allowing businesses to run their models in private environments. Cohere documentation emphasizes on prem, virtual private clouds (VPC), or even air-gapped (completely offline) systems.
This setup makes Cohere appealing to industries like banking, healthcare, and government, where security and compliance are non-negotiable. Cohere also supports “sovereign AI,” meaning data and models can stay within a country’s borders if required by law.
How is Cohere Different from OpenAI and Anthropic?
While OpenAI and Anthropic focus heavily on consumer-friendly products (like ChatGPT or Claude), Cohere takes a different path. It targets enterprise customers, offering them secure, customizable solutions.
Instead of just showcasing how creative a chatbot can be, Cohere focuses on practical tools, such as retrieval models (Rerank and Embed). These models improve AI assistants’ intelligence by guaranteeing they only review the most relevant documents before responding. This reduces errors and makes AI results more reliable.
Who Uses Cohere?
Cohere collaborates with some of the largest names in technology and enterprise, including Oracle, Dell, SAP, Salesforce, RBC, and Notion. Its partnership with Oracle allows customers to train and use models on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, while Dell integrates Cohere’s AI into secure on-premises systems.
According to some reports, Cohere’s annual recurring revenue is expected to double to about $100 million by early 2025, with a target of $200 million by year-end. This demonstrates that an increasing number of companies are entrusting Cohere with critical business tasks, not just experiments.
What Are The Products Like in Real Use?
If a company wants to build a private assistant over thousands of documents, Cohere’s Command models can generate responses, while Rerank and Embed improve search accuracy. For multilingual needs, Aya enables interaction across languages.
Cohere’s North platform takes it a step further by allowing businesses to set up agents that can run complete workflows, automate repetitive office tasks, and hand tasks over to humans when needed, all while keeping data secure within company systems.
The Bottom Line: Why Cohere Matters
Cohere has built its name around trust, privacy, and control. While other AI startups compete for consumer attention, Cohere is building tools that fit directly into the workflows of large organizations. Its focus on private deployment, security, and real productivity makes it stand out in a crowded market.
If your business cares about data safety but still wants the power of modern AI, Cohere offers a serious option that’s worth exploring.
