Cohere raises $500M to reach $6.8B valuation; hires former head of Meta AI research team

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Cohere, a rapidly growing artificial intelligence company based in Canada, has wrapped up a fresh $500M funding round, which propelled its valuation to $6.8B, as it appears it is getting closer to going public.

The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with additional participation from existing investors including AMD Ventures (AMD [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/AMD]), NVIDIA (NVDA [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/NVDA]), PSP Investments, and Salesforce Ventures (CRM [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/CRM]) and several new investors.

"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," the company said.

The company added a pair of tech heavyweights to its executive offices as well. Joelle Pineau joins as Cohere's Chief AI Officer. She previously served as Meta's (NASDAQ:META [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/META]) VP of AI Research and is currently a professor at the School of Computer Science at McGill University. She is a core member of Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Cohere also hired Francois Chadwick as its chief financial officer. He previously held that role at Uber (UBER [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/UBER]) where he helped the company during its IPO transition.

"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," said Cohere CEO and co-founder Aidan Gomez. "We're thrilled to welcome Joelle and Francois, whose experience, talent and insight will be instrumental in continuing Cohere's growth."

Last month, Cohere completed another $500M funding round that sent its valuation to $5.5B.

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