Based in Toronto Cohere is set to announce a $500 million Series D round at a valuation of $5.5 billion, in line with Bloomberg Report.
This round has been reported for months now, and one of the articles mentioned Reuters Agency last month reported that the artificial intelligence startup was raising $450 million in investment from high-profile corporate investors at a valuation of $5 billion.
The recent round will reportedly be led by a Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investmentsand includes investments from Cisco, Fujitsu, AMD Projects and the Canadian Export Credit Agency EDC. Other report he said Nvidia AND Salesforce Projects 1 also participated.
Cohere builds large language models that allow AI to learn from recent data. They may be customized and deployed in applications for features like interactive chat or text generation.
In June 2023, the company raised $270 million in Series C led by Inovia Capital at a valuation of $2.2 billion. Investors in this round include Nvidia, OracleSalesforce Ventures, DTCP AND SentinelOne — in addition to financial institutions and VC firms A terrific asset, Schroders Capital, Thomvest Projects AND Index projectsFounded in 2019, the company has raised nearly $935 million, in line with Crunchbase.
Money keeps flowing into AI
While Cohere’s recent round wasn’t a surprise, it further illustrates the price investors are willing to pay to avoid being overlooked of the AI race. Those investors include a growing list of high-profile corporations and their enterprise capital arms—many of them in the chip industry—that are trying to get in on the ground floor of those generative AI startups.
This yr, investment in AI has far outpaced last yr’s pace, with AI startups raising $39.4 billion, in line with CrunchbaseThis is significantly higher than last yr at this time, when similar startups raised lower than $31 billion.