Cohere Reaches $7B Valuation a Month Post-Funding Round, Collaborates with AMD

Cohere, the creator of AI models, announced on Wednesday that it has raised an additional $100 million, bringing its valuation to $7 billion as part of an extension to a funding round disclosed in August. At that time, the August round had raised an oversubscribed $500 million with a valuation of $6.8 billion.

In an intriguing shift in its partnership strategy, Cohere has formed a collaboration with AMD, one of its investors, even as competitor OpenAI secured an investment of up to $100 billion from industry leader Nvidia.

Cohere’s full suite of Command-family AI models, which encompasses vision, translation, and reasoning capabilities, is now compatible with AMD’s Instinct GPU, which competes with Nvidia’s products. Furthermore, AMD will also employ Cohere’s services internally as a client. However, Cohere clarified to TechCrunch that it is not exclusively shifting its focus to AMD and will continue to support Nvidia GPUs as well.

Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, a pivotal contributor to the “Transformer” paper that ignited the modern generative AI movement, Cohere has positioned itself as a prominent player in the AI model landscape.

While a valuation increase from nothing to $7 billion in just six years would have been remarkable a decade ago, Cohere now finds itself overshadowed by the rapid growth of OpenAI and its primary competitor, Anthropic. For context, OpenAI’s valuation was reportedly around $500 billion last month, while Anthropic recently achieved an $183 billion valuation.

With a consistent focus on the enterprise sector, Cohere is actively marketing its offerings to businesses that value AI sovereignty—retaining local control over their data and models instead of outsourcing them to third parties. In this latest $100 million funding round, new investors included the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management, recognized for its investments in Mexico and Iberia.