Cohere

startup

canada · Founded 2019 · Valuation: $7B as of 2025-09

Cohere 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.

Website Wikipedia HuggingFace GitHub Artificial Analysis OpenRouter

open-weightenterprisemultilingualembeddingsretrieval

People

Aidan Gomez Google Scholar OpenReview — CEO & Co-founder (formerly Google Brain (intern, "Attention Is All You Need" co-author); PhD Oxford)
Nick Frosst Google Scholar OpenReview — Co-founder (formerly Google Brain Toronto (Hinton's first hire))
Joelle Pineau Google Scholar OpenReview — Chief AI Officer (since Aug 2025) (formerly Meta FAIR (VP of AI Research, ~8 years); McGill University (Professor))
Phil Blunsom Google Scholar OpenReview — Chief Scientist (since Apr 2022) (formerly DeepMind (Principal Researcher); Oxford (Professor))
Sara Hooker Google Scholar OpenReview — 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

Outputs (8)

Cohere Transcribe

model

2026-03-26

2B-parameter open-source ASR model. Topped the HuggingFace Open ASR Leaderboard with 5.42 average WER. Supports 14 languages. Apache 2.0.

Tiny Aya

model

2026-02-17

3.35B-parameter edge-deployable multilingual model in 5 regional variants: Base, Global, Earth (Africa/West Asia), Fire (South Asia), Water (Asia-Paci…

Aya Vision

model

2025-03-03

Multilingual multimodal model (8B and 32B) using Command R7B base + SigLIP2 vision encoder with multimodal adapter. 23 languages. 8B beats Qwen-2.5-VL…

Command A

model

2025-03-01

Cohere's current flagship. 111B dense Transformer with a novel hybrid attention: 3 sliding-window attention layers (4096 window) +…

Aya Expanse

model

2024-12-06

Multilingual frontier at 8B and 32B. Parallel Attention+FFN layers, SwiGLU, RoPE. 128K context, 23 languages. 32B beats Llama 3.1 70B (54% Arena-Hard-…

Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons

paper

2024-07-20

DataProvenance audit revealing the rapid decline of AI training data availability as websites restrict crawling. Influential AI governance research fr…

Command R / R+

model

2024-03-12

First open-weight Command models. Command R (35B) and Command R+ (104B), both dense Transformers with 128K context supporting 23 languages. Optimized…

Aya 101

model

2024-02-01

Landmark multilingual model covering 101 languages (50+ previously underserved), built through a global collaboration of 3,000+ re…