Cohere vs Scale AI: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
A full-year revenue figure is unavailable here for Cohere. Scale AI had $870M (unaudited) of annual revenue in FY2024.
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.
Scale AI
Scale is private and does not publish audited results. Bloomberg reported about $870 million of revenue in 2024 and a target near $2 billion for 2025 before the Meta deal. After OpenAI and Google pulled back, that target looked out of reach, but CEO Jason Droege wrote in early 2026 that 2025 was Scale's biggest revenue year, with more than $1 billion in new business and nearly half of bookings in Q4. The company valued itself at more than $29 billion in the June 2025 Meta transaction, up from $13.8 billion in its May 2024 Series F. Net income has not been disclosed, though Scale says the data business is now profitable. Scale AI is an absolute powerhouse in the artificial intelligence infrastructure sector, providing massive data labeling and RLHF services with a private market valuation of approximately $13.8 billion.
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 |
Scale AI
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2024 (unaudited) | $870M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2023 | $335M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2022 (unaudited) | $290M | — | — | — | 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.
Scale AI
- Data business
Not disclosed
Training data, RL environments, robotics data and evaluations for AI labs and large technology companies; profitable since the second half of 2025, per the company.
- Applications: enterprise
Not disclosed
Generative AI applications for companies such as Mayo Clinic, BP and Allianz.
- Applications: public sector
Not disclosed
AI programs for the U.S. Department of War and international governments including Qatar, the UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
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.
Scale AI
How it makes money
Scale AI earns money in two ways. Its data business charges AI labs and large technology companies for training data, reinforcement learning environments and model evaluations, produced by software pipelines plus a paid contributor network run through Outlier and Remotasks; the company says it has paid contributors more than $1 billion over ten years.
Growth strategy
Scale's 2026 plan, as described by its leadership, is to move technical capabilities from the data business into applications faster, invest in a unified AI-native platform for enterprise and government customers, and expand abroad. It opened or grew offices in New York, London, Washington, D.C., Doha, St.
Competitive advantage
Scale's advantages are scale, track record and government access. It has applied what it calls 15 billion human decisions to train leading models across 150 languages and locales, it runs SEAL benchmarks such as Humanity's Last Exam and SWE-Bench Pro that labs cite at launch, and it holds U.S.
Questions about Cohere vs Scale AI
Which company has higher revenue — Cohere Inc. or Scale AI, Inc.?
Scale AI, Inc. had $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024). A comparable annual revenue figure for Cohere Inc. was unavailable here.
How does revenue per employee compare for Cohere Inc. and Scale AI, Inc.?
Scale AI, Inc. generates $725k / 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 Scale AI, Inc. make money?
Cohere Inc. and Scale AI, Inc. generate revenue in fundamentally different ways. Cohere Inc.: Cohere makes money by selling AI to businesses, not consumers. Scale AI, Inc.: Scale AI earns money in two ways.
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 Scale AI overview