AI Startup Cohere Locks Up $270M At $2.2B Valuation

Toronto-based became the latest artificial intelligence startup to raise big money at an even bigger valuation.

The startup raised a $270 million Series C led by at a valuation of $2.2 billion.

Other investors in the round include some big corporate names 鈥� , , 1, and 鈥� as well as financial institutions and VC firms , , and .听

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Cohere builds large language models that allow AI to learn from new data, and can be customized and put into applications for features like interactive chat or to generate text.

, a venture partner at Thomvest Ventures, told SA国际传媒 News his firm made the investment for a handful of reasons, including Cohere鈥檚 engineering and management teams, its multicloud and hybrid cloud approach and its significant strategic channels option 鈥� as well as the market in general.

There is a 鈥渕assive market opportunity in LLM space which is exploding,鈥� Padval said. 鈥淐ohere has all the elements which would make them successful.鈥�

AI trends

The Cohere round illustrates two trends right now in AI 鈥� big money and some of that money from big-name tech companies.

Nvidia, for instance, just became a trillion-dollar market cap company after its shares exploded thanks to demand for its chips used in AI. The company, like several other tech titans, has been placing bets into AI startups for years. The same can be said for Salesforce Ventures, which just last month participated in the $450 million Series C for 鈥� a rival with its AI assistant Claude 鈥� which also included and .

Of course, the Cohere and Anthropic deals are not the only huge AI deals recently.

In April, , an AI-enhanced market intelligence platform, raised $100 million from investors that included 鈥� 鈥檚 independent growth fund.

In March, closed a $150 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation led by . The Palo Alto, California-based AI startup allows people to create their own personalized AI chatbot using language models and deep-learning algorithms.

Also in March, San Francisco-based raised $350 million in a Series B 鈥� at a post-money valuation of at least $1 billion.

Of course the craze started in January with news of Microsoft鈥檚 massive $10 billion investment into 鈥� creator of .