Cohere is an enterprise artificial intelligence company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, with headquarters in Toronto and operations in San Francisco and London. Aidan Gomez was a co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper, giving the company deep roots in modern language model research.
Cohere builds large language models and AI tooling designed specifically for enterprise deployment, with an emphasis on privacy, security, and data control. Its product suite includes the Command family of generative models, Embed and Rerank for retrieval and search, and Transcribe for speech-to-text.
The company has raised substantial venture funding, reaching a multibillion-dollar valuation with backers including Inovia Capital, NVIDIA, Oracle, and others, positioning it as a leading independent enterprise AI provider. It also operates Cohere Labs, its non-profit research arm.
Cohere differentiates itself by allowing organizations to deploy models within virtual private clouds, on-premises, or through a managed Model Vault, keeping sensitive data under customer control. This security-first posture targets regulated industries wary of sending proprietary data to public AI services.
Cohere serves enterprises in finance, healthcare, telecommunications, and the public sector that require customizable, deployable AI for retrieval-augmented generation, search, and automation. It competes with major foundation model providers while focusing on enterprise control and deployment flexibility rather than consumer applications.