Cohere
In plain wordsA Canadian AI company, founded in Toronto in 2019, that builds language models and search tools for businesses and governments rather than consumer chatbots.
A Canadian AI company that develops large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. and related tools for business and government customers, emphasizing private deployment, data security and multilingual use rather than consumer chatbots. Its products include the Command generation models, Embed models that produce text embeddingstext embedding, n.: A list of numbers that captures what a piece of text means, so that texts with similar meanings get similar lists. Computers use them to search, sort and group text by meaning. and Rerank models for search and retrieval-augmented generationretrieval-augmented generation, n.: Giving an AI an open-book exam: before answering, it looks up relevant passages in a set of documents and bases its reply on them, often citing where each point came from., and the North workspace platform for agentsAI agent, n.: An AI system that does not just answer but acts: given a goal, it decides on steps, uses tools such as a browser or code editor, checks the results and keeps going until the job is done.. Its nonprofit research lab, Cohere Labs (founded as Cohere For AI in 2022), leads Aya, an open, volunteer-driven project building models and datasets for more than 100 languages. Cohere presents itself as a sovereign AIsovereign AI, n.: A country's ability to build and run AI on its own terms, so that the computers, models and know-how it relies on cannot be withheld or dictated by foreign companies or governments. supplier for Canada and allied countries; in September 2026 it signed an agreement to merge with the German AI company Aleph Alpha.
Origin
Founded in 2019 in Toronto by Aidan Gomez, a co-author of Attention Is All You NeedAttention Is All You Need, prop. n.: The 2017 Google research paper that introduced the transformer, the neural-network design behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and nearly every other modern AI language system., with Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst; Gomez is chief executive. Joelle Pineau, formerly head of Meta's FAIR lab, joined as chief AI officer in 2025.
Related
- large language modellarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.
- retrieval-augmented generationretrieval-augmented generation, n.: Giving an AI an open-book exam: before answering, it looks up relevant passages in a set of documents and bases its reply on them, often citing where each point came from.
- text embeddingtext embedding, n.: A list of numbers that captures what a piece of text means, so that texts with similar meanings get similar lists. Computers use them to search, sort and group text by meaning.
- sovereign AIsovereign AI, n.: A country's ability to build and run AI on its own terms, so that the computers, models and know-how it relies on cannot be withheld or dictated by foreign companies or governments.
- Attention Is All You NeedAttention Is All You Need, prop. n.: The 2017 Google research paper that introduced the transformer, the neural-network design behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and nearly every other modern AI language system.
- Mistral AIMistral AI, prop. n.: Europe's best-known builder of large AI language models, a Paris start-up dating from 2023 whose chatbot is called Le Chat. Many of its models are free for anyone to download and run.