Two sources with knowledge of the issue indicated that Cohere, a Toronto-based artificial intelligence startup, had raised $250 million in fresh funding. This is just another indication of the heated interest in a fresh type of A.I. technology.
The people indicated that Cohere is worth roughly $2 billion as part of the agreement. Salesforce, a major provider of web-based software, Nvidia, the Toronto-based venture capital firm Inovia Capital, and the Silicon Valley-based firm Index Ventures are among the investors. A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Pieter Abbeel, as well as Index, Tiger Global, and other investors, contributed $170 million to the startup, which was formed in 2019.
Cohere builds technology that other businesses can use to deploy chatbots, search engines and other A.I.-driven products. It is among a small group of companies — including the tech industry’s giants and a handful of start-ups — that are building technology that could rival systems under development at OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that kicked off the generative A.I. boom in November with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT.