The Toronto-based AI startup is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in a new round, sources told Reuters. Cohere declined to comment on fundraising to The Logic. (Reuters, The Logic)

Talking point: Founded in 2019, the company has raised US$170 million to date according to PitchBook data. Investors include New York crossover fund Tiger Global Management, Toronto-based Radical Ventures and Index Ventures of San Francisco and London. Training the large language models that feed Cohere’s platform is “extraordinarily expensive,” CEO Aidan Gomez told The Logic last week, but that machine-made dialogue and text can then be provided much cheaper to clients. Other startups in the space have raised significant sums, many from Big Tech backers who are themselves accelerating generative AI applications. Last fall, Cohere was reportedly in talks to raise at least US$200 million from Google; the search giant subsequently put US$300 million into peer Anthropic. Gomez said there are advantages to “arrangements of convenience” between startups and companies like Microsoft and Google with the supercomputers needed to run the technology, but noted there are downsides to “locking yourself into one of them.”