Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce Ventures were among the investors in a $270M funding round for Cohere, a startup working on generative AI for enterprise licensing. The Series C round values the OpenAI competitor at more than $2B. Cohere creates customizable large language models to power features like interactive chat and text generation in applications. - The startup aims to offer a gen AI service to companies that would address concerns about proprietary data associated with Microsoft-backed OpenAI's GPT models.
- Cohere said its enterprise AI suite could be deployed within a customer's existing cloud virtual private cloud or on-site.
- DTCP, SentinelOne, Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, Thomvest Ventures, and Index Ventures were among the other investors in the Series C round.
Founded by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst in 2019, Toronto-based Cohere has raised over $440M. - Gomez, Cohere's CEO, was among the Google VBrain researchers to co-author the landmark "Attention Is All You Need" paper introducing the Transformer architecture that powers GPT-4 and other LLMs.
- Other Transformer co-authors who have left Google to firm their own startups include Noam Shazeer, who founded Character AI, and Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani, who founded Adept AI.
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