British media: AI startup Cohere plans to raise $1 billion

According to the Financial Times, Cohere, an artificial intelligence startup founded by a former Google scientist, is in talks to raise up to $1 billion in funding. Investors are currently competing to support large language models, which can rival the systems being developed by Microsoft-supported OpenAI. Three sources said the Toronto-based startup has not yet determined the valuation of the new round of financing, nor has it determined the exact financing target, but two of them said that $500 million to $1 billion in new capital has been discussed. According to Crunchbase data, this figure exceeds the total amount Cohere has attracted from investors in four rounds of financing to date, and is expected to greatly exceed its $2.2 billion valuation in June 2023 when it raised $270 million. At that time, financing came from investors such as Nvidia and Oracle, as well as venture capital firms such as Index Ventures and Inovia Capital.