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Thursday, May 4, 2023
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Technology|Generative A.I. Start-Up Cohere Valued at About $2 Billion in Funding
Round

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/technology/generative-ai-start-up-cohere-funding.html
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GENERATIVE A.I. START-UP COHERE VALUED AT ABOUT $2 BILLION IN FUNDING ROUND

Founded by ex-Google researchers, the Toronto company is among the few start-ups
prepared to compete with the creator of ChatGPT.

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Nick Frosst, a founder of Cohere; Martin Kon, the company’s president; and Aidan
Gomez, the chief executive; in their Toronto office.Credit...Nathan Cyprys for
The New York Times


By Cade Metz

Cade Metz has covered artificial intelligence for more than a decade.

May 2, 2023

Cohere, a Toronto artificial intelligence start-up, has raised $250 million in
new funding, two people with knowledge of the situation said, in yet another
sign of feverish interest in a new kind of A.I. technology.

The deal values Cohere at about $2 billion, the people said. Investors include
the internet software giant Salesforce, the chip maker Nvidia, the Toronto
venture capital firm Inovia Capital and the Silicon Valley firm Index Ventures.

The start-up, which was founded in 2019, previously raised $170 million from
investors including Index, Tiger Global and the well-known A.I. researchers
Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Pieter Abbeel.

Cohere builds technology that other businesses can use to deploy chatbots,
search engines and other A.I.-driven products. It is among a small group of
companies — including the tech industry’s giants and a handful of start-ups —
that are building technology that could rival systems under development at
OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that kicked off the generative A.I. boom in
November with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT.



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Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, two Canadian researchers who
had worked on artificial intelligence at Google, and Ivan Zhang, a Toronto
entrepreneur. Mr. Gomez was among the Google researchers who published a key
research paper that helped lead to ChatGPT and similar technologies.



ChatGPT has captured the imagination of millions of people with its ability to
do things like answer questions, write term papers and poetry, and generate
computer code. As the chatbot’s popularity has grown, the tech industry has
focused on generative artificial intelligence — technologies that can generate
text, images and other media in response to short prompts.

Many companies are exploring the fringes of this new area, but only a few have
the resources to build the technologies from the ground up. These companies have
an unusual blend of experienced researchers, enormous ambition and large amounts
of money.

Though investors have been reluctant to fund other start-ups, they have been
pouring money into the few companies at the forefront of generative A.I.

In February, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, bringing its total
investment in the company to $13 billion. And in March, Character.ai, another
start-up that builds online chatbots, raised $150 million in a funding round
that valued the company at $1 billion.



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The result of more than a decade of research inside companies like OpenAI,
generative A.I. companies are poised to remake everything from internet search
engines like Microsoft Bing to digital tutors.







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