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Cohere Inc.

Enterprise AI Foundation ModelsFounded 2019
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Company data updated: October 2026

Founders

Who Founded Cohere?

Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst · Founded 2019 · HQ today: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Who founded Cohere?

Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst in 2019. It is now led by Aidan Gomez.

Founders
Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst
Founded
2019
Headquarters
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Number of founders
3
Current CEO
Aidan Gomez (since 2019)
Where was Cohere founded?
Cohere was founded in Toronto, Canada in 2019.
When was Cohere founded?
Cohere was founded in 2019.
Who started Cohere?
Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst.
How old is Cohere?
Cohere is 7 years old as of 2026.

Founding Story

In 2017, Aidan Gomez, then an intern at Google Brain in Toronto, co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need', the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture used in modern language models. Gomez and Ivan Zhang had earlier started FOR.ai, an independent research collective, and Nick Frosst had worked with Geoffrey Hinton at Google Brain's Toronto lab. In 2019 the three founded Cohere in Toronto to make Transformer-based language models usable by ordinary businesses through a simple API.

Aidan Gomez

Background

Aidan Gomez studied computer science at the University of Toronto and interned at Google Brain, where he co-authored the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need' that introduced the Transformer. He later pursued a DPhil in machine learning at the University of Oxford.

Role at Cohere Inc.

Aidan Gomez is co-founder and CEO of Cohere. As a Google Brain intern he co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017) with seven other researchers. He co-founded Cohere in Toronto in 2019 and has led it through funding rounds that lifted its valuation to about $7 billion by September 2025, revenue growth to roughly $240 million ARR in 2025, and the 2026 merger agreement with Aleph Alpha. Gomez is a frequent voice in Canadian and international debates on sovereign AI. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Ivan Zhang

Background

Ivan Zhang studied at the University of Toronto before leaving to work on AI research and co-founding the independent research collective FOR.ai with Aidan Gomez.

Role at Cohere Inc.

Ivan Zhang is a co-founder of Cohere. Before Cohere he co-founded FOR.ai, an open research collective, with Aidan Gomez. At Cohere he has worked on the engineering and infrastructure that serve the company's models to enterprise customers. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Nick Frosst

Background

Nick Frosst holds an absolutely elite academic and professional background in deep learning. Before co-founding Cohere, he was specifically hired by the legendary Geoffrey Hinton to serve as the very first employee at Google Brain's Toronto laboratory. This deeply rigorous, foundational background researching neural networks alongside the 'Godfather of AI' provided Frosst with an unparalleled understanding of advanced machine learning mechanics, which he directly applied to architect Cohere's proprietary models.

Role at Cohere Inc.

Nick Frosst is a co-founder of Cohere. He was Geoffrey Hinton's first hire at Google Brain's Toronto lab, where he published research on capsule networks and adversarial robustness. At Cohere he has focused on research and model behavior, and he is also known as the lead singer of the Toronto indie band Good Kid.

Nick Frosst was born in 1993 in Canada.

Cohere Inc.: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Joelle Pineau

Chief AI Officer

2025 – Present

Her academic research heavily influences the foundational reinforcement learning techniques used by enterprise AI startups globally.

Francois Chadwick

Chief Financial Officer

2025 – Present

He brought deep operational expertise from his time at Uber to manage the rapid headcount expansion of the AI startup.

Phil Blunsom

Chief Technology Officer

2025 – Present

As Chief Scientist, he directs the core research team, ensuring Cohere's models remain competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic in massive-scale language understanding.

Martin Kon

President and Chief Operating Officer

2023 – 2025

As President and COO (hired away from YouTube), he professionalized the startup's go-to-market strategy, driving significant ARR growth in the highly competitive B2B AI sector.

Aidan Gomez

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

2019 – Present

As co-founder and CEO, he leveraged his status as a co-author of the seminal 'Attention Is All You Need' paper to secure massive funding from Oracle and Nvidia.

Compare Cohere Inc. Leadership With Competitors

Cohere Inc. vs Google DeepMind Leadership →Overview
Cohere Inc. vs Scale AI, Inc. Leadership →Overview
Cohere Inc. vs ElevenLabs Leadership →Overview
Cohere Inc. vs Suno Leadership →Overview
Cohere Inc. vs DeepSeek Leadership →Overview

Keep researching Cohere

Who Founded Cohere? FAQ

Who are the three co-founders of Cohere?

Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez (Chief Executive Officer), Nick Frosst (Co-Founder and Machine Learning Research Lead), and Ivan Zhang (Co-Founder and Engineering Leader) in Toronto, Ontario.

What is Nick Frosst's background and contribution to Cohere?

Nick Frosst is a Canadian computer scientist and AI researcher who worked directly under Turing Award laureate Geoffrey Hinton at Google Brain's Toronto laboratory, publishing influential papers on capsule networks, neural network interpretability, and embeddings before co-founding Cohere.

What is Ivan Zhang's background and role in founding Cohere?

Ivan Zhang is a software engineer and entrepreneur who previously founded social media and technical ventures (including FOR.ai, an independent AI research group founded with Aidan Gomez) and built the core distributed computing and inference infrastructure powering Cohere's initial platform.

How did the founders meet and decide to start Cohere?

The founders met in the vibrant Toronto AI research ecosystem centered around the University of Toronto, Vector Institute, and Google Brain. Recognizing that large language models would transform all computing but were trapped inside mega-cap tech monopolies, they launched Cohere to make LLMs accessible to all enterprise developers.

What was FOR.ai and how did it lead to the creation of Cohere?

FOR.ai (Foundation for Open-Access AI Research) was an independent, decentralized research collective founded in 2017 by Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang to democratize AI research across international scientists. Its success in collaborative ML engineering served as the direct operational foundation for Cohere.

What role did the Toronto AI ecosystem and Vector Institute play in Cohere's founding?

Toronto's status as a global epicenter of deep learning, fostered by AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, provided Cohere with top-tier research talent, university partnerships, and early Canadian venture support.

Are all three co-founders still active at Cohere?

Yes, Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang remain actively engaged at Cohere, driving executive strategy, core fundamental AI research, and scalable machine learning systems engineering.

What initial problem did the founders set out to solve in 2019?

In 2019, deploying natural language processing models required large supercomputing clusters and specialized PhD-level expertise. The founders set out to create a simple API that abstract away infrastructure complexities, allowing any software developer to harness advanced transformer models with a single line of code.

Who are the founders of Cohere?

Aidan Gomez (a key architect of the Transformer), Nick Frosst (who worked under AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton at Google Brain), and Ivan Zhang (Gomez's long-time friend and technical builder) founded the company in Toronto to keep top AI talent in Canada.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.