TORONTO — Cohere is opening an office in Seoul, South Korea, in an attempt to win more clients for its AI tools in Asia.

The outpost will be led by Andrew Chang, the firm’s new vice-president for Asia-Pacific, who was hired in May. He was previously Korea country manager for Confluent, a Silicon Valley startup selling data-management software. Prior to that, Chang held executive roles in Asia for Google, Microsoft and IBM.

Cohere is hiring in Seoul, although it did not provide details of its current workforce or recruitment targets in the country. The firm’s careers page currently lists three open roles in the  city. Its in-house research unit, Cohere Labs, is also extending its grant program to Korean universities. The program gives researchers discounted access to the firm’s AI tools.

While the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic raise billions in funding to chase artificial general intelligence, Toronto-based Cohere has taken a different path, targeting big businesses in highly regulated industries with more focused large language models (LLMs). It has also put greater emphasis on finding clients overseas.

“A lot of places in the world are under-serviced by large language models right now,” co-founder Nick Frosst told The Logic in a February interview. Cohere sees particular opportunity in countries where a relatively small share of the population speaks English, but which have a lot of large businesses that are already digitized.

To win in those markets, the firm touts how well its AI tools work in languages other than English. Cohere has co-developed models in Japanese and Korean with tech giants Fujitsu and LG CNS, respectively. The firm is also working with Saudi Arabian conglomerate STC Group to adapt its AI agent platform, North, for the telecom industry.

In May, the Korea Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it had contracted LG to build an “AI system dedicated to diplomatic functions.” The department eventually hopes to use AI agents to help develop strategies, and also to deliver government services. Cohere said the project will employ the models it built with LG. 

Cohere is already making a big push into the public sector in markets closer to home. Last month, the firm announced it was working with the Canadian and British governments to deploy AI in the operations of each.

Cohere now has over 400 staff around the world. In the last 18 months, it has opened new offices in Montreal and New York. It’s also planning to grow its workforce in London, and has an office in San Francisco. 

The Canadian firm is following some of its rivals into Asia. OpenAI, the LLM market leader, has offices in Tokyo and Singapore. Paris-based Mistral also recently opened an office in Singapore.