While the rest of us were baking sourdough and crafting Hinge prompts, Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst were building Canada’s next big AI company.
What happened: In just five years, Toronto-based Cohere has become one of the most valuable startups in the country, after closing a funding round valuing it at US$5.5 billion. The $500 million raised this round will go towards hiring and computing resources.
- Cohere has succeeded without building a public-facing chatbot, which co-founder Ivan Zhang called “enormous cost centres” in an interview with The Peak last month.
- Instead, the company focuses on building large language models that serve the needs of businesses, like summarizing documents or powering custom chatbots.
Why it matters: Cohere’s success makes Canada home to one of the world’s most valuable AI companies. The company’s newest model, Command R+, was built to directly compete with technology from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, with the aim of costing less.
Bottom line: A lot is said about the use of AI at work, but much of the technology is still too imperfect, risky, and costly to apply at a large scale. But as the efficiency, safety, and affordability of those products improve, businesses can start tapping into real-world benefits of AI.—SB