PRIVATE EQUITY

Cohere raises $500M at $6.8B valuation to accelerate enterprise efficiency with agentic AI

Fresh funding enables Cohere to accelerate its global expansion and build the next generation of secure enterprise and sovereign AI solutions.

 

Company strengthens its leadership team with the additions of former Head of Meta’s Fundamental AI Research and LLM pioneer Joelle Pineau as Chief AI Officer and former Uber exec François Chadwick as CFO

Today, we’re excited to announce Cohere’s latest $500M raise at a $6.8B valuation in an oversubscribed round led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with additional participation from existing investors including AMD Ventures, NVIDIA, PSP Investments, and Salesforce Ventures, as well as new investors, including Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (“HOOPP”), among others. 

 

The new capital will enable us to accelerate our efforts to make businesses and governments around the world vastly more efficient, simplifying tedious tasks through agentic AI solutions. We aim to free up people to spend their time on the interesting, challenging, and human parts of work–all while prioritizing data security. This represents a security-first category of enterprise AI that is simply not being met by repurposed consumer models. Our approach enables us to offer AI solutions that provide local data control, better regulatory compliance, and digital sovereignty.

 

To support our growth, we’re proud to announce the expansion of our leadership group, adding key expertise to drive our next chapter.

  • Joelle Pineau will be joining as Chief AI Officer to advance our cutting-edge research and product development. 
  • François Chadwick will be joining as Chief Financial Officer to oversee finance and business operations as we accelerate growth to serve our expanding global customer base. 

 

Joelle is a highly respected leader in the AI industry and will be based in our Montréal office. She is a Professor at the School of Computer Science at McGill University and as a core member of Mila, the Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute. She was previously Meta’s VP of AI Research, leading its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team.

 

François is a proven finance and technology executive who will be based in our San Francisco office. He has held key corporate leadership roles, including serving as Uber’s acting CFO, helping scale finance operations globally and playing a leadership role during the company’s IPO. François most recently rejoined KPMG, advising high-growth tech companies, after serving as CFO at Shield AI.

 

This fresh funding follows a year of accelerated growth through strategic partnerships, and the launch of North, our security-first agentic AI platform. On the strategic partnership front, we now work with global leaders, including Oracle, Dell, RBC, Bell, Fujitsu, LG CNS, SAP, and Ensemble Health Partners to deliver transformative solutions across critical industries such as finance, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, energy, and the public sector.

 

Key product innovations include a suite of new enterprise-grade applications built on top of our generative model series (Command A and Command A Vision), retrieval models (Embed 4 and Rerank 3.5), and our flagship agentic AI platform, North, that brings them all together.

 

"Cohere is becoming the world's chosen partner for integrating AI into their critical industries. We are at a pivotal moment in accelerating the delivery of secure AI that empowers enterprises worldwide, and we’re excited to enter this new phase of expansion alongside our partners. We’re thrilled to welcome Joelle and François, whose experience, talent and insight will be instrumental in continuing Cohere's growth." – Aidan Gomez, Co-founder and CEO of Cohere

 

“We have been proud investors and partners with Cohere and its founders since day one, with a vision to deliver leading AI for business. Cohere is fulfilling that promise by building privacy-first, cloud-agnostic models and agentic AI applications that are driving extraordinary productivity gains and ROI to blue-chip enterprises, businesses and governments worldwide. We are co-leading this investment round because this is just the beginning for Cohere.” – Jordan Jacobs, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Radical Ventures

 

“The company's relentless focus on customers' time to value, data privacy, and customization uniquely positions Cohere to lead the enterprise AI adoption, both at home and internationally. We’re proud to continue supporting them as they reshape the future of work.” – Patrick Pichette, Partner, Inovia Capital, who will be joining Cohere’s Board of Directors.