Cohere, an artificial intelligence start-up in Toronto, has raised $250 million in new funding, two people with knowledge of the situation said, in yet another sign of feverish interest in a new breed of AI technology.
The deal values Cohere at about $2 billion, the people said. Investors include Internet software giant Salesforce, chip maker Nvidia, Toronto-based venture capital firm Inovia Capital and Silicon Valley firm Index Ventures.
The start-up, founded in 2019, previously raised $170 million from Index, Tiger Global and well-known AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Pieter Abbeel, among others.
Cohere builds technology that other companies can use to deploy chatbots, search engines, and other AI-driven products. It is one of a small group of companies — including the tech industry giants and a handful of start-ups — building technology to rival systems under development at OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that launched Generative in November. AI boom started with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT.
Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, two Canadian researchers who had worked on artificial intelligence at Google, and Ivan Zhang, a Toronto-based entrepreneur. Mr. Gomez was one of the Google researchers who published an important research paper that contributed to ChatGPT and similar technologies.
ChatGPT has captured the imagination of millions of people with its ability to do things like answer questions, write term papers and poetry, and generate computer code. As the popularity of the chatbot has grown, the technology industry has turned to generative artificial intelligence – technologies that can generate text, images and other media in response to brief prompts.
Many companies are exploring the fringes of this new field, but few have the resources to build the technologies from scratch. These companies have a special mix of experienced researchers, enormous ambition and large sums of money.
While investors are hesitant to fund other startups, they have poured money into the few companies leading the way in generative AI
In February, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, bringing the total investment in the company to $13 billion. And in March, Character.ai, another start-up building online chatbots, raised $150 million in a funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.
The result of more than a decade of research within companies like OpenAI, generative AI companies are poised to recreate everything from internet search engines like Microsoft Bing to digital educators.
