(stylized as co:here) is a Canadian startup that provides

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

models that help companies improve human-machine interactions. Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst.

History

In 2017, a team of researchers at Google Brain, which included Aidan Gomez, published a paper called "Attention is All You Need," which introduced the

transformer A transformer is a passive component that transfers electrical energy from one electrical circuit to another circuit, or multiple circuits. A varying current in any coil of the transformer produces a varying magnetic flux in the transformer' ...

machine learning architecture, setting state-of-the-art performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. Gomez and Nick Frosst, another researcher at Google Brain, founded Cohere along with Ivan Zhang, with whom Gomez had done research at FOR.ai. All of the co-founders also attended

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institu ...

. On May 4, 2021, Cohere officially launched. They also announced that they had been working with a small number of test customers, including Ada Support, a chatbot support service-provider. In November 2021,

Google Cloud Google Cloud Platform offers numerous integrated cloud-computing services, including compute, network, and storage. Products Past and present products under the Google Cloud platform include: Current * Google Cloud Datastore, a NoSQL data ...

announced that they would be partnering with Cohere. Google Cloud would help power Cohere's platform using their robust infrastructure, and Cloud's TPUs would be used by Cohere for the development and deployment of their products.

Funding

On September 7th, 2021, Cohere announced that they had raised $40 million in Series A funding led by

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a Europe, European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Sinc ...

; Index Ventures partner

Mike Volpi Michelangelo "Mike" Volpi (born 13 December 1966) is an Italian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He worked as an engineer, eventually becoming chief strategy officer at Cisco Systems during the company’s growth era, acquiring ove ...

also joined Cohere's board. The round also included Radical Ventures, Section 32, and AI-experts

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on ...

Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei Li (; born 1976) is a Chinese-American computer scientist who is known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Sta ...

Pieter Abbeel Pieter Abbeel is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the co-founder ...

, and

Raquel Urtasun Raquel Urtasun is a professor at the University of Toronto. Urtasun uses artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, to make vehicles and other machines perceive the world more accurately and efficiently. Education Urtasun received he ...

.{{Cite news, last=Silcoff, first=Sean, date=2021-09-07, title=Toronto AI startup Cohere raises US$40-million as it looks to bring Google-quality predictive language to masses, language=en-CA, work=The Globe and Mail, url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/technology/article-toronto-ai-startup-cohere-raises-us40-million-as-it-looks-to-bring/, access-date=2021-12-31

References

Natural language processing software Companies based in Toronto