This text is taken from Courrier de l’économie. Click here to subscribe.
On June 8, Toronto-based Cohere completed a $360 million (US$270 million) Series C round of financing led by Montreal-based investment fund iNovia Capital. Cohere’s goal: to become the world leader in generative artificial intelligence applications for businesses.
Already, things are not looking bad for Cohere, a company of about 200 employees, half of whom are in Canada. In the world of generative AI, where the undisputed star is OpenAI with its ChatGPT dialog, Cohere is generally seen as one of the most credible handful of tech startups.
OpenAI has experienced a prodigious jump in popularity in recent months, giving it a book value that experts put at around US$25 billion. Anthropic, founded by OpenAI alumni, is worth US$5 billion. Following the funding round announced ten days ago, Cohere sees its valuation at just over US$2 billion.
iNovia Capital has a fairly positive track record when it comes to investing in Canadian technologies. Other investors in Cohere include microprocessor maker Nvidia, which recently saw its stock market value surpass US$1 trillion thanks to its involvement in AI, and multinational IT company Oracle.
A digital personal assistant for the office
What Cohere offers is ChatGPT-like technology tailored to business needs. Its AI model resembles that of OpenAI, but it is installed locally, directly on company servers, which prevents the risk of data leaks to the outside.
He draws all the information he can from almost everywhere: emails, Slack messaging, marketing database, financial results, etc. He analyzes all of this and can answer questions that are as general as they are very specific, in 109 languages. This is what Martin Kon, Cohere’s COO, calls “recall-augmented information generation” (retrieval augmented generation).
“Our model only uses the data to which the company gives it access. He knows where to look to retrieve information that will actually be useful to people, presented in a way that makes it trustworthy,” says the Duty Martin Kon.
Concretely, Cohere hopes to provide people in business with the equivalent of a hyper-intelligent digital administrative assistant. “It will be enough to dialogue with him to find new business opportunities, new ways to be more productive, etc., and discover it in a few seconds rather than after several days of analysis”, adds Martin Kon.
Interestingly enough, Cohere has discovered that its technology, as it collects, interprets and then more or less popularizes data that can be technical or specialized, partly helps bridge the digital and decision-making divide that can exist between technology specialists, senior management and employees whose position is closer to the base of the hierarchical pyramid.
“These new forms of AI are a real breakthrough,” says Martin Kon. It’s as big as Google in its day. Companies that will tame them faster will be more competitive quickly. »
We’ll see. At least if Cohere — which presents itself more as an international company rather than a strictly Canadian one — manages to establish itself as a world leader in AI, perhaps it will make up for chronic Canadian technological failures, ranging from the downfall of BlackBerry to the tens of millions gobbled up seemingly for nothing in Element AI.