Cohere
startupCohere is a Canadian AI company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez (CEO, co-author of "Attention Is All You Need"), Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst (Geoffrey Hinton's first hire at Google Brain Toronto). With $1.6B raised at a $7B valuation and ~$240M ARR in 2025, Cohere focuses on enterprise-grade sovereign AI with secure, on-premises deployment. An IPO is widely anticipated for 2026.
The Command model family evolved from proprietary origins through the open-weight Command R/R+ (35B/104B, 128K context) to the current flagship Command A (111B, 256K context, Mar 2025), which uses a novel hybrid sliding-window + global attention architecture and model merging rather than MoE. Cohere also pioneered enterprise retrieval with the Embed and Rerank families.
Through Cohere Labs (formerly Cohere For AI, founded by Sara Hooker), Cohere produced the Aya multilingual model series — built through a 3,000+ researcher global collaboration covering 101 languages. Aya Expanse, Aya Vision, and Tiny Aya advanced multilingual capability, safety, and edge deployment. The lab also produced influential AI governance research including "Consent in Crisis" (NeurIPS 2024). Sara Hooker departed in 2025 to co-found Adaption Labs; Joelle Pineau (former Meta FAIR VP) joined as Chief AI Officer.
People
- Aidan Gomez Google ScholarOpenReview — CEO & Co-founder (formerly Google Brain (intern, "Attention Is All You Need" co-author); PhD Oxford)
- Nick Frosst Google ScholarOpenReview — Co-founder (formerly Google Brain Toronto (Hinton's first hire))
- Joelle Pineau Google ScholarOpenReview — Chief AI Officer (since Aug 2025) (formerly Meta FAIR (VP of AI Research, ~8 years); McGill University (Professor))
- Phil Blunsom Google ScholarOpenReview — Chief Scientist (since Apr 2022) (formerly DeepMind (Principal Researcher); Oxford (Professor))
- Sara Hooker Google ScholarOpenReview — Former Head of Cohere Labs (departed 2025; co-founded Adaption Labs) (formerly Google Brain (Research Scientist))
News
- 2026-02-13 Cohere's $240M Year Sets Stage for IPO — TechCrunch
- 2025-08-14 Cohere Raises $500M at $6.8B Valuation — Cohere
- 2025-08-14 Cohere Hires Long-Time Meta Research Head Joelle Pineau as Chief AI Officer — TechCrunch