Cohere, the artificial intelligence start-up founded by ex-Google scientists, is in talks to raise as much as $1bn in financing as investors race to back large language models that can rival systems under development by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Three people close to the talks said the Toronto-based start-up had not yet fixed a valuation for its new round or an exact fundraising target, but two of the people said a range of $500mn to $1bn in fresh capital had been discussed.
That is more than the total Cohere has lured from investors across four fundraising series to date, according to Crunchbase, and is expected to give the company a far higher valuation than the $2.2bn it achieved when it raised $270mn — which came from investors including Nvidia and Oracle and venture firms including Index Ventures and Inovia Capital — in June 2023.