Cohere raises $270M Series C at $2.2B valuation
The $2.1-2.2bn valuation came in well below the more than $6bn some reports had floated, and the round was led by Inovia Capital with Nvidia and Oracle among the backers.
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Cohere, the Toronto-based enterprise language-model company founded by former Google Brain researchers, raised $270 million in a Series C round led by Inovia Capital, valuing the company at between $2.1 billion and $2.2 billion. Other participants included Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP, SentinelOne, Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Index Ventures — a mix of chipmaker, cloud and enterprise-software investors reflecting Cohere’s positioning as infrastructure for corporate customers rather than a consumer-facing product.
The valuation landed well below figures — north of $6 billion — that had circulated in earlier reporting on the round, a gap TechCrunch noted at the time. Cohere framed the raise around its enterprise pitch: multilingual models deployable across public cloud, private cloud or on-premises infrastructure, aimed at customers wanting to keep control of their data rather than call a shared API. Existing clients cited included Jasper and HyperWrite for copywriting and LivePerson for fine-tuned deployments, and the company said it planned to expand into retrieval and task-execution capabilities such as booking and scheduling.
The round placed Cohere in the second tier of the 2023 funding boom — well capitalised relative to most start-ups, but a fraction of the valuations OpenAI and Anthropic were commanding from Microsoft and Google/Amazon over the same period, underscoring how sharply investor money concentrated at the very top of the frontier-lab field even as the wider market for language-model start-ups grew.