Other investors in the Toronto-based AI startup’s round include tech firms Nvidia, Oracle and Salesforce Ventures as well as the Thomson family office, Thomvest; Hamburg-based DTCP; Seoul-based Mirae Asset; and London-based Schroders Capital. The investment is all equity and primary capital into the company, said Rajan Sheth, Cohere’s vice-president of marketing. (The Logic)

Talking point: Generative AI is so hot right now—companies in the space have raised nearly US$13.7 billion in 201 deals already this year, nearly three times the US$4.77 billion in all of 2022, according to PitchBook. Founded in September 2019, Cohere offers technology allowing clients to add machine-made text to their products, like context-aware search and assisted copywriting. While San Francisco-based OpenAI has aligned with Microsoft’s cloud and capital, its Canadian peer wants to avoid “becoming beholden” to one of the major compute providers, CEO Aidan Gomez told The Logic in February; Cohere uses Google Cloud, but says it can serve clients just as well on other providers’ systems. Still, it’s building its own Big Tech alliances, with chief AI chipmaker Nvidia, enterprise SaaS pioneer Salesforce, and server giant Oracle.