Cohere vs DeepSeek: Founders, CEOs and History
Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst and is led by Aidan Gomez. DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and is led by Liang Wenfeng.
Company facts
Founders
Cohere
Aidan Gomez
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.
Ivan Zhang
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.
Nick Frosst
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.
DeepSeek
Liang Wenfeng
Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in 2023. Leveraging the massive GPU clusters and algorithmic expertise he built at his quantitative trading firm, High-Flyer, he aimed to build a purely Chinese, open-source AI rival to OpenAI.
CEOs and their tenures
Cohere
- Aidan Gomez2019–present
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
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.
Source - Martin Kon2023–2025
President and Chief Operating Officer
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.
Source - Joelle Pineau2025–present
Chief AI Officer
Her academic research heavily influences the foundational reinforcement learning techniques used by enterprise AI startups globally.
Source - Francois Chadwick2025–present
Chief Financial Officer
He brought deep operational expertise from his time at Uber to manage the rapid headcount expansion of the AI startup.
Source - Phil Blunsom2025–present
Chief Technology Officer
As Chief Scientist, he directs the core research team, ensuring Cohere's models remain competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic in massive-scale language understanding.
Source
DeepSeek
- Liang Wenfeng2023–present
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
As CEO, he utilized the massive, pre-existing compute infrastructure from his high-frequency trading firm to rapidly iterate on LLM architectures, bypassing the traditional venture capital funding cycle.
Source
Timeline: Cohere and DeepSeek side by side
2017Cohere
Aidan Gomez Co-Authors 'Attention Is All You Need'
Aidan Gomez and Google Brain colleagues published the landmark paper introducing the Transformer architecture.
2019Cohere
Cohere Founded in Toronto
Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst founded Cohere to build privacy-first enterprise language models.
2021Cohere
Series A Funding & Multi-Cloud Platform Launch
Raised $40 million Series A led by Index Ventures, debuting its commercial developer API for text generation and embeddings.
2022Cohere
Strategic Partnership with Oracle Cloud
Formed historic alliance with Oracle, making Cohere the primary generative AI engine embedded across Oracle Cloud Applications.
2022Cohere
Series B Funding
Cohere raised $125 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global in February 2022.
2023Cohere
Series C Funding at $2.2B Valuation Led by Inovia
Raised $270 million in Series C funding with participation from NVIDIA, Oracle, and Salesforce Ventures.
2023Cohere
Debut on Amazon Bedrock & Release of Embed v3
Integrated models into Amazon Bedrock and launched Embed v3, establishing leadership in multilingual search.
2023DeepSeek
DeepSeek spun out of High-Flyer
High-Flyer announced an AGI lab in April 2023; it became the independent company DeepSeek on 17 July 2023.
2023DeepSeek
First open models
Released DeepSeek-Coder and DeepSeek-LLM 67B in November 2023.
2024Cohere
Launch of Command R and Command R+
Released Command R (March) and Command R+ (April) for enterprise RAG and tool use.
2024Cohere
$500M Series D Funding at $5.5B Valuation
Closed $500 million Series D led by PSP Investments, with participation from Cisco, AMD, and Fujitsu, reaching a $5.5B valuation.
2024DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V2 introduces MLA
May 2024 release introduced Multi-head Latent Attention and DeepSeekMoE and triggered a Chinese API price war.
2024DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V3 launched
December 2024: 671B-parameter MoE model; final training run reported at ~$5.6M of H800 GPU time.
2025Cohere
Command A, North and ~$7B valuation
Launched Command A and North, raised $500 million at $6.8 billion, and reached about $7 billion after a September extension.
2025DeepSeek
DeepSeek-R1 and chatbot launch
January 2025 reasoning model rivalled OpenAI o1; the app hit No. 1 on the US App Store and Nvidia fell ~17% in a day.
2025DeepSeek
V3.1 and V3.2
V3.1 added a hybrid thinking/non-thinking mode; V3.2 introduced sparse attention for long-context efficiency.
2026Cohere
Reports $240M ARR for 2025
Investor memo showed about $240 million ARR, beating its $200 million target.
2026Cohere
Aleph Alpha merger announced and signed
Announced in April 2026 with a ~$565 million (€500 million) Schwarz Group commitment; definitive agreement signed September 16, 2026.
2026DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V4 family
24 April 2026: V4-Pro and V4-Flash released as MIT-licensed open weights with a 1M-token context; V4-Pro reached general availability in August 2026.
2026DeepSeek
First outside funding and IPO preparation
June 2026 Series A of ~50 billion yuan (~$7.4B) at a valuation near $50B; Bloomberg reported IPO preparations in July for a 2027 debut.
2026DeepSeek
Huawei Ascend software toolkit
30 September 2026: open-sourced programming tools for Huawei Ascend chips, an alternative to Nvidia's CUDA stack.
Acquisitions
Cohere
- Reliant AI2026Undisclosed
- Aleph Alpha2026Undisclosed
- Ottogrid2025Undisclosed
DeepSeek
No verified acquisitions are listed.
Questions about Cohere vs DeepSeek
Who is the CEO of Cohere Inc. and DeepSeek?
Cohere Inc. is led by Aidan Gomez and DeepSeek is led by Liang Wenfeng. Both serve as the top executive responsible for the company's strategy, operations, and financial performance.
When was Cohere Inc. founded vs DeepSeek?
Cohere Inc. was founded in 2019 — 4 years before DeepSeek, which was founded in 2023. Cohere Inc.'s longer operating history gives it a deeper track record but also potentially more institutional inertia compared to the younger DeepSeek.
How many employees does Cohere Inc. have compared to DeepSeek?
Cohere Inc. employs approximately 350 people, while DeepSeek employs approximately 160. Cohere Inc. has the larger workforce at 350 employees, compared to DeepSeek's 160. A higher headcount does not necessarily imply greater efficiency — it often reflects differences in business model (e.g., manufacturing vs. software).
Where are Cohere Inc. and DeepSeek headquartered?
Cohere Inc. is headquartered in Canada and DeepSeek is headquartered in China. Their different home markets mean they may face different regulatory frameworks, tax regimes, and currency exposure.
Who founded Cohere Inc. and DeepSeek?
Cohere Inc. was founded by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst. DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng.
Which company has a longer operating history — Cohere Inc. or DeepSeek?
Cohere Inc. has been operating for approximately 7 years, making it the more established of the two companies. DeepSeek has been in operation for around 3 years. A longer operating history often signals greater institutional resilience and brand recognition, though it can also mean slower adaptation to new market conditions.
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