Cohere

Cohere Inc. is a Canadian multinational technology company focused on artificial intelligence. Cohere specializes in large language models and AI products for regulated industries, particularly the finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy fields, as well as the public sector. Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst and is headquartered in Toronto, with offices in Montreal, New York City, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Seoul. In April 2026, Cohere agreed to acquire German AI firm Aleph Alpha.

History

In 2017, a team of researchers at Google Brain introduced the transformer machine learning architecture in "Attention Is All You Need," which demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. In 2019, Aidan Gomez, one of its co-authors, along with Nick Frosst, another researcher at Google Brain, founded Cohere with Ivan Zhang, with whom Gomez had done research at FOR.ai. All of the co-founders attended the University of Toronto.

Gomez is the company's CEO. In December 2022, Martin Kon, the former CFO of YouTube, became president and COO.

In November 2021, Google Cloud announced they would help power Cohere's platform using their infrastructure, and Cloud's TPUs would be used by Cohere for the development and deployment of their products.

In June 2022, Cohere launched Cohere Labs (previously called Cohere For AI), a nonprofit research lab and community to contributing open-source, fundamental machine learning research. It was led by Sara Hooker, a former research scientist at Google Brain until her departure in September 2025. Cohere Labs is now led by Marzieh Fadaee.

In December 2022, Cohere released a multilingual model for understanding text that would work with over 100 languages, to help users search for documents by meaning instead of keywords. This type of process was not previously widely available in languages other than English.

On September 12, 2023, it was announced that Cohere had become one of fifteen tech companies to sign on to a voluntary White House commitment on measures for testing, reporting, and research on the risks of AI. On September 27, 2023, it was announced that Cohere had also signed Canada's voluntary code of conduct for AI, to promote the responsible development and management of advanced generative AI systems.

In 2024, Cohere opened an office in New York City. In 2025, they expanded to Montreal, Canada, Paris, and Seoul.

In May 2025, Cohere acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating certain kinds of market research. In June 2025, it was announced that Cohere had partnered with the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom to expand the use of AI in the public sector. In August 2025, Cohere hired Joelle Pineau as Chief A.I. Officer and Francois Chadwick, a former Uber executive and KPMG US partner, as its first Chief Financial Officer.

On April 10, 2026, Cohere and Aleph Alpha announced that they were in talks to merge and have Berlin's support for a potential deal. On April 24, Cohere and Aleph Alpha announced that a merger would go through in a deal which Cohere would acquire Aleph Alpha. While the terms of the deal were not public, an anonymous individual told New York Times it would make the combined companies worth $20 billion. The deal was made in a bid to challenge AI dominance from primarily the United States as well as China, with the New York Times noting that they had struggled to keep up in attracting investment from US-based companies. The terms of the deal also involve $600 million in investment to Cohere from Schwarz Gruppe, already prominent investors in Aleph Alpha.

Products

Considered an alternative to OpenAI, Cohere works on generative AI, building technology that businesses can use to deploy chatbots, search engines, copywriting, summarization, and other AI-driven products. Cohere specializes in large language models: AI trained to digest text from internal data or publicly available sources to understand how to process and respond to prompts with increasing sophistication.

The Cohere platform is available through an API as a managed service and through platforms such as Amazon SageMaker and Google's Vertex AI. It is cloud agnostic and not tied to a particular cloud service. Cohere's generative AI technology is embedded into several Oracle products, and its chat capabilities are embedded into Salesforce products.

In March 2025, Cohere's nonprofit research lab introduced Aya Vision, an AI model that can describe images, translate text, and summarize information. The model is free for research but is not permitted to be used for commercial purposes.

Partnerships…