Cohere is an enterprise AI company founded in 2019 in Toronto by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang. Aidan Gomez, the company’s co-founder and CEO, was one of the eight authors of the 2017 Transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need” while an intern at Google Brain. The company positions itself around businesses rather than consumers: rather than a public chatbot, it sells language models, embeddings, and retrieval components that enterprises plug into their own systems.
Cohere’s product line centers on its Command family of generative models, alongside Embed and Rerank for search, and platforms such as North and Compass for workplace use. Its models are built with a strong emphasis on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool use, and multilingual support, areas the company treats as central to enterprise deployments where answers must be grounded in a customer’s own documents. Per its own account, Cohere has raised close to a billion dollars across Series A through D rounds between 2021 and 2024, and operates from offices including Toronto, New York, London, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, and Seoul.
Why business readers should care: Cohere is one of the few frontier-scale model builders that sells almost entirely to enterprises, with a deliberate focus on data control, retrieval grounding, and on-premises or private-cloud deployment - a different posture from the consumer-facing labs.