Cohere Inc. is a Toronto-based enterprise AI company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang. It builds the Command A language models, Embed and Rerank search models, and the North agent platform for businesses and governments that want AI running on infrastructure they control. Cohere reported about $240 million in annual recurring revenue for 2025 and signed a definitive agreement in September 2026 to merge with Germany's Aleph Alpha.
What does Cohere do?
- Command A and Command A+: enterprise language models for agents, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation and multilingual work. Command A+ (May 2026) is open-weight and runs on as few as two H100 GPUs.
- North: an AI workspace where employees use agents connected to internal documents and apps, deployable in private environments.
- Embed and Rerank: search and retrieval models used to build enterprise search and RAG systems.
- Private and sovereign deployment: models installed in a customer's VPC, on-premise data center or national cloud.
How does Cohere make money?
Cohere charges per token for API and cloud-marketplace use (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Azure), sells annual contracts for private deployments of its models and North, and takes on custom and sovereign AI projects for governments and large enterprises.
Cohere revenue and valuation
Cohere is private and does not publish audited results. Reported annualized revenue grew from about $13 million at the end of 2023 to roughly $100 million in mid-2025 and about $240 million ARR at the end of 2025, beating a $200 million target. Its valuation went from $2.2 billion (2023) to $5.5 billion (July 2024), $6.8 billion (August 2025) and about $7 billion (September 2025). The Aleph Alpha combination and Schwarz Group-anchored Series E were reported at a value near $20 billion.
Who owns Cohere and who runs it?
Cohere is owned by its founders, employees and investors including PSP Investments, Inovia Capital, Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, Cisco, AMD Ventures and Fujitsu. Aidan Gomez is CEO; Joelle Pineau is chief AI officer, Francois Chadwick is CFO and Phil Blunsom is CTO.
The Aleph Alpha merger
Announced in April 2026 and formalized on September 16, 2026, the merger will keep the Cohere brand, with dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin and a research center in Heidelberg. Schwarz Group is investing ~$565 million (€500 million), and the deal remains subject to regulatory approvals.
Who are Cohere's competitors?
Cohere competes with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral AI, plus open-weight models such as Meta's Llama. It differentiates on private deployment, efficiency and cloud neutrality rather than consumer reach.
