Cohere hits $7B valuation a month after its last raise, partners with AMD

On Wednesday, Enterprise AI model-maker Cohere said it raised an additional $100 million — bumping its valuation to $7 billion — in an extension to a round announced in August. The August round was an oversubscribed $500 million round at a $6.8 billion valuation, the company said at the time.

Cohere also announced an interesting twist on a partnership. While competitor OpenAI just nabbed an up-to $100 billion investment from the biggest GPU player, Nvidia, Cohere has signed a deal with AMD, which is one of its investors.

Cohere’s full suite of Command-family AI models, including the Command vision, translate, and reasoning models, can now run on AMD’s Instinct GPU, a Nvidia GPU competitor. Moreover, AMD will be using Cohere internally as a customer. Cohere is not, however, abandoning support of Nvidia GPUs to strictly support AMD, the company tells TechCrunch.

Cohere began as a front runner in the AI model race. It was co-founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, one of the authors of the “Transformer” paper that gave rise to the modern generative AI boom.

But, while a zero-to-$7 billion valuation in six years would have been awe inspiring a decade ago, Cohere has since been overshadowed by the blindingly fast rise of OpenAI and its closest competitor Anthropic. OpenAI for instance, was reportedly valued at $500 billion last month while Anthropic hit an $183 billion valuation early this month.

Cohere, which has always focused on the enterprise market, is now marketing itself to enterprises where AI sovereignty is urgent, aka keeping local control of the data and models, rather than putting them in the hands of a foreign entity. To that end, Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management (known for its Mexico and Iberia funds) were new investors in this fresh $100 million round, Cohere says.