Cohere

Cohere is a Toronto-based AI company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez — a co-author of the original transformer paper — with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang. It deliberately avoids the consumer chatbot race, instead selling its Command, Embed, and Rerank models to enterprises and governments that need private, on-premises, or sovereign deployments. It has become a key player in retrieval-augmented generation and secure enterprise AI.

Cohere emerged from the Google Brain diaspora: CEO Aidan Gomez co-wrote "Attention Is All You Need" as an intern, and founded the company in 2019 to commercialize large language models for business use. From the start it positioned itself as cloud-agnostic and enterprise-first, avoiding dependence on any single hyperscaler.

Its product line pairs the Command generative family with best-in-class Embed and Rerank models for search and retrieval, plus North, a secure agent platform for regulated workplaces. Cohere models ship on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, AWS Bedrock, Azure, and — distinctively — fully air-gapped on-premises environments for governments and financial institutions.

Oracle is both a significant investor and a distribution partner, embedding Cohere models across its SaaS applications, and the company has courted sovereign-AI programs in Canada and beyond. Later funding rounds brought in strategic investors including chipmakers as Cohere expanded inference partnerships across NVIDIA and AMD hardware.