Josh Gartner, head of communications at Cohere, told TechCrunch that the financing sets Cohere up for “accelerated growth.” “[W]e continue to significantly expand our technical teams to build the next generations of accurate, data privacy-focused enterprise AI,” Gartner said in a statement. “Cohere is laser-focused on leading the AI industry beyond esoteric benchmarks to deliver real-world benefits in the daily workflows of global businesses across regions and languages.”

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu. The round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, values Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. That’s more than double the startup’s valuation from June 2023, when it secured $270 million from Inovia Capital and others, and brings Cohere’s total raised to $970 million.

Aiden Gomez launched Cohere in 2019 along with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, with whom Gomez had done research at FOR.ai, a sort of progenitor to Cohere. Gomez is one of the co-authors of a 2017 technical paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” that laid the foundation for many of the most capable generative AI models today, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and many of its generative AI startup rivals, Cohere doesn’t have a big consumer focus. Instead, the company customizes its AI models, which perform tasks such as summarizing documents, writing website copy, and powering chatbots, for companies like Oracle, LivePerson, and Notion.