Cohere hits $7B valuation a month after its last raise, partners with AMD

On Wednesday, Enterprise AI model maker Cohere said it raised an additional $100 million — bumping its valuation to $7 billion — in an extension to a round announced in August. The August round was an oversubscribed $500 million round at a $6.8 billion valuation, the company said at the time.

Cohere also announced an interesting twist on a partnership. While competitor OpenAI just nabbed an up-to $100 billion investment from the biggest GPU player, Nvidia, Cohere has signed a deal with AMD, which is one of its investors.

The company’s full suite of Command-family AI models, including the Command vision, translate, and reasoning models, can now run on AMD’s Instinct GPU, an Nvidia GPU competitor. Moreover, AMD will be using Cohere internally as a customer. Cohere is not, however, abandoning support of Nvidia GPUs to strictly support AMD, the company tells TechCrunch.

Cohere began as a front-runner in the AI model race. It was co-founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, one of the authors of the “transformer” paper that gave rise to the modern generative AI boom.

But, while a zero-to-$7 billion valuation in six years would have been awe-inspiring a decade ago, Cohere has since been overshadowed by the blindingly fast rise of OpenAI and its closest competitor Anthropic. OpenAI, for instance, was reportedly valued at $500 billion last month while Anthropic hit a $183 billion valuation early this month.

Cohere, which has always focused on the enterprise market, is now marketing itself to enterprises where AI sovereignty is urgent — that is, keeping local control of the data and models, rather than putting them in the hands of a foreign entity. To that end, Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management (known for its Mexico and Iberia funds) were new investors in this fresh $100 million round, Cohere says.