Canada-based AI developer Cohere scored an investment worth $270 million from its latest funding round participated by technology giants including Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and Deutsche Telekom’s investment arm.
The funding was headed by technology start-up investor Inovia Capital, with backing from companies representing shareholders from US, UK, Canada, Korea and Germany, Cohere stated.
Founded in 2019, Cohere builds large language models, software trained on massive swaths of the internet to analyse and generate text, and customises them for users.
It promotes itself as an enterprise-focused AI company, with multilingual generative models and chatbots for businesses among its portfolio.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, said Cohere “has made foundational contributions to generative AI” and its tools will help enterprises use the technology “to automate and accelerate”.
Nvidia is among the aggressive players in the heated AI race, recently becoming the first chipmaker to hit a $1 trillion valuation, albeit briefly.
It was also involved in the training of Microsoft’s generative AI tools.
Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners MD Lance Matthews cited Cohere’s “rare combination of top-tier talent” and “most-innovative technology” as holding the potential to open global enterprise opportunities in the AI segment.
Bloomberg reported Cohere is valued at between $2.1 billion and $2.2 billion, with the Series-C funding round bringing the total raised by the company to around $445 million.
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