Ivan Zhang

Ivan Zhang possesses a highly intense background in self-directed artificial intelligence research. Before founding Cohere, he studied at the University of Toronto, where he famously dropped out to co-found FOR.ai, an independent AI research collective. This incredibly hands-on background in coordinating global, decentralized machine learning research and engineering complex models outside of massive corporate structures gave him the exact technical agility required to build Cohere's initial architecture.

Ivan Zhang is a co-founder of Cohere. An exceptional systems architect, Zhang previously co-founded artificial intelligence consultancy FOR.ai alongside Aidan Gomez, conducting distributed machine learning research. At Cohere, Zhang leads distributed cloud infrastructure, backend API scalability, and datacenter operations, architecting the low-latency multi-cloud pipelines that allow Cohere's Command and Embed models to serve millions of daily corporate API calls across AWS, OCI, and Azure. At Cohere, Zhang leads a high-quality distributed systems and infrastructure engineering team. He architected Cohere's multi-cloud serving fabric, developing custom low-latency inference runtimes that allow Command R+ and Embed v3 to execute across heterogeneous GPU hardware on AWS, Oracle Cloud, and private enterprise VPCs with 99.99% operational uptime. His systems engineering mastery ensures that Cohere delivers high throughput at industry-leading cost efficiency.