AI startup Cohere, which specializes in natural language processing (NLP) models for businesses, is in discussions to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, sources told Reuters.

While the amount hasn't been disclosed, Reiters report that the funding round would value Cohere at more than $6B.

Founded in 2019, Toronto-based Cohere provides an API for companies to deploy natural language processing capabilities, such as chatbots.
The startup competes with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic in the generative AI space.
For example, Cohere plans to soon release a text-generating model that would compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Cohere's model would be geared more toward businesses and developers, CEO Aidan Gomez told Reuters.
"Our chat models are focused more on business applicable tasks like answering questions than writing poems," said Gomez, who declined to say how much Cohere is seeking to raise.

The company has raised at least $170M to date.
In October, it was reported that Google was in discussions to invest $200M into Cohere.
Cohere had also communicated with Nvidia about a possible strategic investment.
Gomez, a co-founder, was previously an intern at Google Brain. He co-authored the paper introducing the Transformer AI model architecture upon which Cohere's technology, OpenAI's GPT-3, and others are built.