Cohere vs DeepSeek: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
A full-year revenue figure is unavailable here for Cohere. DeepSeek had $70.7M of annual revenue in FY2026.
Latest financial snapshot
Financial summary
Cohere
Cohere is private and does not publish audited financials, so its figures come from investor communications and press reports. Annualized revenue was about $13 million at the end of 2023, roughly $100 million by mid-2025, and $240 million ARR at the end of 2025, ahead of a $200 million target (The Globe and Mail, CNBC, February 2026). Its valuation rose from $2.2 billion (Series C, June 2023) to $5.5 billion (Series D, July 2024), $6.8 billion (August 2025, $500 million raise) and about $7 billion after a $100 million extension in September 2025. The April 2026 Aleph Alpha combination and a concurrent Series E, anchored by Schwarz Group, were reported to value the company near $20 billion, and in September 2026 The Globe and Mail reported talks to raise a further $2 billion to $3 billion. Cohere has not disclosed net income.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek does not publish revenue or profit figures, and no audited numbers are available; earlier third-party revenue estimates could not be verified and have been removed from this profile. What is reported: the final DeepSeek-V3 training run cost about $5.6 million in rented-GPU terms (2.788 million H800 GPU hours, excluding research and hardware costs), and the company stayed funded by High-Flyer until June 2026. That month it closed a Series A of about 50 billion yuan (~$7.4 billion); Liang personally committed about 20 billion yuan, Tencent about $1.39 billion (10 billion yuan) and CATL about $695 million (5 billion yuan), according to Reuters. Post-money valuation was reported between ~$50 billion (Bloomberg) and ~$59 billion (SCMP). In July 2026 Bloomberg reported talks to raise ~$1.5 billion more at about $71 billion ahead of a mainland IPO targeted for 2027.
Revenue and profit by year
Cohere
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2025 run-rate | $240M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2024 run-rate | $62M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2023 run-rate | $13M | — | — | — | Source |
DeepSeek
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $70.7M | — | — | +427.6% | Source |
| FY2025 | $13.4M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2024 run-rate | $1.5M | — | — | — | Source |
Where the revenue comes from
Cohere
- Model API and cloud marketplace usage
Not disclosed
Per-token fees for Command, Embed and Rerank through Cohere's API and partners such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Bedrock and Microsoft Azure.
- Private deployment and North subscriptions
Not disclosed
Annual contracts for running Cohere models and the North agent platform in customer VPCs, on-premise or in sovereign clouds.
- Custom and sovereign AI projects
Not disclosed
Custom model development and deployment work for governments and large enterprises, such as Japanese-language models with Fujitsu.
DeepSeek
No segment breakdown is published.
Business model and strategy
Cohere
How it makes money
Cohere makes money by selling AI to businesses, not consumers. Customers pay per token to call its Command, Embed and Rerank models through Cohere's own API or cloud marketplaces such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Bedrock and Microsoft Azure.
Growth strategy
Cohere's growth strategy has shifted from selling raw model APIs to selling complete, privately deployable AI systems. Key moves include the North agent platform (2025), acquisitions of Ottogrid (2025), Reliant AI (May 2026) and the pending Aleph Alpha merger, new offices in Paris and Seoul, and partnerships with cloud and software vendors including Oracle, Fujitsu, OpenText and Schwarz Group's STACKIT.
Competitive advantage
Cohere's main edge is deployability. Its models are built to run on as few as two GPUs (Command A, and Command A+ released in May 2026) and can be installed in a customer's private cloud, on-premise data center or air-gapped environment, rather than only through a shared API. That matters for regulated buyers and governments pursuing sovereign AI.
DeepSeek
How it makes money
DeepSeek makes money mainly by selling access to its models through a pay-per-token API (OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash), priced well below US rivals. Its consumer chatbot on web and mobile is free. Model weights are published under the MIT license, so anyone can self-host them;
Growth strategy
DeepSeek's growth plan rests on three moves: keep releasing competitive open-weight models (V4-Pro, V4-Flash and the multimodal V4-Flash-Vision-Exp in 2026) to win developers; undercut closed-model API prices to grow paid usage; and reduce dependence on Nvidia by optimising for Chinese chips, shown by its September 2026 open-source toolkit for Huawei's Ascend accelerators.
Competitive advantage
DeepSeek's edge is cost efficiency: its models use sparse Mixture-of-Experts designs (V3 activates 37B of 671B parameters per token; V4-Pro reportedly 49B of 1.6T) and Multi-head Latent Attention, which let it train and serve near-frontier models with far fewer GPUs than US labs. Open MIT-licensed weights and low API prices give it unusually broad developer reach.
Questions about Cohere vs DeepSeek
Which company has higher revenue — Cohere Inc. or DeepSeek?
DeepSeek had $70.7M (FY2026). A comparable annual revenue figure for Cohere Inc. was unavailable here.
How does revenue per employee compare for Cohere Inc. and DeepSeek?
DeepSeek generates $442k / employee in revenue per employee. A comparable figure for Cohere Inc. requires matching employee and revenue data from the same reporting period.
How do Cohere Inc. and DeepSeek make money?
Cohere Inc. and DeepSeek generate revenue in fundamentally different ways. Cohere Inc.: Cohere makes money by selling AI to businesses, not consumers. DeepSeek: DeepSeek makes money mainly by selling access to its models through a pay-per-token API (OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash), priced well below US rivals.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the Cohere vs DeepSeek overview