Toronto-based AI startup Cohere has bagged an additional $100 million raise to take its valuation to $7 billion.
The announcement extends Cohere’s August round, pulling heavyweight partners like AMD and Nvidia even closer.
“We will use this funding to further accelerate the development and global adoption of our security-first enterprise AI technology across the public and private sectors. This comes as we are rapidly scaling our operations across North America, APAC, and EMEA to meet the increasing demand for secure and sovereign AI solutions,” said Cohere.
Happy hunting grounds for AI startups
The August round was an oversubscribed $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation, led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital with participation from AMD, Nvidia, and Salesforce. Yesterday’s $100 million extension brought in new investors, including Business Development Bank of Canada and Nexxus Capital Management.
Cohere’s customer list sounds like a data center floor tour, Oracle, Dell, Bell, Fujitsu, SAP, RBC, and Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan. These are not pilots, they are production deployments of the company’s latest Command A series models, which include systems for reasoning, machine translation, and visual data.
The startup explains, “Our models seamlessly integrate with our fully private and customizable agentic AI platform, North, purpose-built for businesses and governments handling sensitive data. North powered agents are now actively transforming critical sectors — finance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, energy, and government — delivering massive efficiency and productivity gains behind your secured firewalls.”
Recent analysis shows the startup has been doing well. It grew from $13 million ARR in late 2023 to approximately $70 million ARR by early 2025, more than 5x growth in 14 months. In the same stretch, the company doubled its workforce from 250 to 500 employees in 2024.
Cohere is not alone in enjoying the good times for AI startups.
US-based AI chip startup Groq raised $750 million to give it a $6.9 billion valuation, more than doubling from $2.8 billion just 13 months ago.
Kleiner Perkins-backed voice AI startup Keplar got $3.4 million seed funding.
