Enterprise Users Focused AI Firm Cohere Weighs Funding Round At Over $6B Valuation

Microsoft Corp MSFT-backed OpenAI rival Cohere weighed raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a funding round that could value the startup at over $6 billion.
Cohere, established by former researchers at Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL in 2019, quickly scaled the AI startup ranks given their intensive research background and close ties to Google, Reuters reports.
Cohere eyed introducing a new dialogue model resembling ChatGPT to let enterprise users generate text and engage with the model to refine the output.
Unlike ChatGPT, Cohere's technology will mainly be accessible to developers and businesses, CEO Aidan Gomez told Reuters in an interview.
"Our chat models are focused more on business-applicable tasks like answering questions than writing poems. We don't plan to hand them over to everyone to use for free without limit," said Gomez.
Cohere has raised $170 million to date from funds.
Cohere competes with a group of foundation model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Gomez said the company differentiates itself by focusing on serving enterprise users.
Cohere forged a cloud partnership with Alphabet to access its TPU computing power in 2022.
Its language AI also became available on Amazon.Com Inc's AMZN fully managed machine learning service SageMaker in January.
In January, Cohere hired Martin Kon, the former chief finance executive at YouTube, to lead its product and market strategy.
Gomez said Cohere would focus on text generation models, unlike its peer OpenAI which has released GPT-3 model for text and DALL-E for image generation.
Gomez said Cohere would not take strategic investments that require exclusive rights.
"It's important for us to stay independent and work with different cloud providers," said Gomez.
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