Cohere is looking to establish a New York office as it grows its workforce amid booming interest in generative AI.

The Toronto-headquartered firm already has offices in Palo Alto, Calif., San Francisco and London. The company aims to open one in New York shortly, president and COO Martin Kon said Thursday at an Empire Club event in Toronto.

Businesses use the firm’s technology to create chatbots, summarize documents and build more context-aware search functionality. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez—a co-inventor of the transformer mechanism that underpins the large language models (LLMs) that power current generative tools—started the company with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang in September 2019. It’s now one of Canada’s most prominent and globally recognized AI companies. 

Cohere already has ties to New York, an epicentre of knowledge-industry headquarters. Last July, it announced McKinsey would help roll out its generative products to the consulting giant’s enterprise clients. Cohere investors Schroders and Index Ventures also have major offices in the city.  

Cohere currently has about 40 per cent of its workers in Toronto with the same share in the U.S. and the rest across Europe, Kon said at the event. In November, the firm announced plans to grow its staff in London to about 50 people; chief scientist Phil Blunsom heads that office. “There’s a lot of great junior [machine-learning] engineers living in Toronto right now,” Frosst told The Logic last year, noting the research strength at the Vector Institute and local universities. But “we’re a global company.”

Cohere has raised US$440 million to date, according to PitchBook data, including a US$270-million Series C round in June 2023 led by Montreal-based Inovia Capital. The firm has reportedly been in discussions to raise up to US$1 billion in additional funding. 

In an email Friday, company spokesperson Kyle Lastovica said Cohere has been looking for a New York office, but has yet to open one.  

Cohere currently has about 30 people—mostly engineers—in the city and surrounding area, according to LinkedIn data. While it’s a remote-first company, many of its current job postings list New York as a role location option, alongside Toronto, San Francisco and London.