Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cohere is now a $7 billion company.
The firm announced Wednesday (Sept. 24) that it had achieved that valuation after raising $100 million in new funding.
“We will use this funding to further accelerate the development and global adoption of our security-first enterprise AI technology across the public and private sectors,” Cohere said in its announcement.
“This comes as we are rapidly scaling our operations across North America, APAC and EMEA to meet the increasing demand for secure and sovereign AI solutions. As organizations prioritize data control and compliance, our solutions are uniquely positioned to address this critical gap in the market.”
The announcement comes weeks after Cohere raised $500 million in new funding at a $6.8 billion valuation in a round that included investments from Nvidia, AMD and Salesforce. Those investors were back for this latest round, along with new backers Nexxus Capital Management and the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC).
“The strong investor demand following our first close last month is a big endorsement of our momentum deploying secure and sovereign AI for the enterprise,” Francois Chadwick, Cohere’s recently-hired chief financial officer, said in a news release.
“We believe that Cohere’s AI solutions are meeting an ignored demand in the market for technology that truly improves the efficiency of businesses and governments, while keeping full control of their data in their own hands.”
As covered here last month, Cohere has positioned itself as exclusively selling to businesses, training its models using internal company data and often running AI workloads on company premises instead of in the cloud.
The AI startup also focuses on security, with CEO Aidan Gomez having argued that this need is “simply not being met by repurposed consumer models.”
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found a growing demand for AI-powered security solutions, with the number of chief operating officers who said the companies were using such solutions growing by threefold last summer.
Cohere has faced some of the same legal challenges as many of its peers in the AI world. The company was sued for copyright infringement in February by the News Media Alliance. That suit claimed Cohere improperly trained its AI model on at least 4,000 copyrighted works. Cohere told PYMNTS the litigation was “misguided and frivolous.”
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/