Report: OpenAI Competitor Cohere Seeking Valuation Higher Than $2.2 Billion

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cohere is reportedly working on a new funding round, two months after completing its previous one.

The amount the company is seeking to raise is undetermined, but it is said to be seeking a valuation higher than the $2.2 billion it achieved in June when it raised $270 million, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Aug. 31), citing unnamed sources.

Cohere did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The company, a competitor to OpenAI, is backed by investors such as Oracle and NVIDIA, according to the report.

Cohere specializes in building large language models (LLMs) that are trained on vast amounts of internet data to analyze and generate text, the report said. The company then customizes these models for various applications, allowing companies to benefit from their capabilities. For example, businesses can use Cohere’s models to summarize customer emails or assist in writing website copy.

The firm’s co-founder and CEO, Aidan Gomez, previously worked at Google and was a co-author of a groundbreaking paper in AI research titled “Attention is All You Need,” per the report. This paper led to significant advancements in the way computers analyze and generate text.

Despite the challenging fundraising environment faced by many tech startups, AI-focused companies like Cohere are experiencing a surge of interest in their technology, per the report.

This report comes a day after AI and LLM company AI21 Labs raised $155 million in Series C funding, bringing the total it has raised to $283 million and valuing the company at $1.4 billion.

AI21 was founded in 2017 and is known for its advanced LLM and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, which it offers through user-friendly applications and application programming interfaces (APIs). The company said it would use its new funding to further develop and provide generative AI services to businesses.

About a week earlier, on Aug. 24, AI startup Hugging Face said that it has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round at a $4.5 billion valuation. Hugging Face’s platform enables developers to freely share code, models and datasets.

PYMNTS research has found that LLMs have the potential to free up huge swaths of human work hours. Forty percent of all working hours could be impacted by LLMs, as reported in “Understanding the Future of Generative AI,” a PYMNTS and AI-ID collaboration.