Canada’s premier AI company is taking a run at the pharmaceutical industry.
What happened: Cohere is buying Montreal-based life science startup Reliant AI, which specializes in building AI tools for drugmakers. The deal is Cohere’s second acquisition of the year, after merging with German AI company Aleph Alpha last month.
Cohere plans to integrate Reliant’s tech into North (its in-house platform for building AI agents) and make custom AI tools for biotech companies.
Reliant, which already counts major drugmakers like GSK and Ipsen Pharma as customers, built an AI platform that analyzes research, academic papers, and clinical trial data to determine which drug candidates are the most viable to go to market.
Why it matters: Cohere has put together a winning playbook for building industry-specific AI tools. The company is betting that it can apply the same model that’s worked for it in finance, healthcare, and government to a lucrative life science sector.
Cohere builds its tools by working with an anchor customer in a given industry that helps it understand which tasks can be automated and how workers can use them.
It has done this with RBC for financial services, STC group for the telecom industry, and even the federal government. With an existing customer base of drugmakers, Reliant gives Cohere the chance to do the same in pharmaceuticals.
Yes, but: Cohere’s bread and butter is customization, but its competition is getting stiffer. After initially focusing almost entirely on general-purpose models, frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have started to hone in on the enterprise market with sector-specific tools for finance, law, and software engineering.—LA
