Toronto-based Cohere is poised to announce a $500 million Series D raised at a $5.5 billion valuation, per a Bloomberg report.
The round had been reported on for months, with a story from Reuters last month saying the AI startup was raising a $450 million investment from big-named corporate investors at a $5 billion valuation.
The new round reportedly will be led by Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments, and includes investment from Cisco, Fujitsu, AMD Ventures and Canada’s export credit agency EDC. Another report said Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures 1 also participated.
Cohere builds large language models that allow AI to learn from new data, and can be customized and put into applications for features such as interactive chat or to generate text.
In June 2023, the company raised a $270 million Series C led by Inovia Capital at a valuation of $2.2 billion. Investors in the round included Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP and SentinelOne — as well as financial institutions and VC firms Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Index Ventures. Founded in 2019, the company has raised nearly $935 million, per Crunchbase.
Cash keeps flowing to AI
While the new round for Cohere was no surprise, it also further illustrates the price investors are willing to pay to not be left out of the AI race. Those investors include a growing list of big-name corporations and their venture arms — many related to the chip industry — who want in on the ground floor of these generative AI startups.
This year, AI investment is well ahead of even last year’s breakneck pace, with AI-related startups having raised $39.4 billion, per Crunchbase. That far outpaces last year at this time, when less than $31 billion had been raised by similar startups.
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