Toronto AI star Cohere raises US$125-million led by Tiger Global
Summary
Cohere Inc., a Toronto artificial-intelligence startup looking to make it easier for humans to talk to machines, has raised US$125-million from Tiger Global Management LLC, the latest in a string of large-scale investments in Canada by the prolific New York financier. Cohere, co-founded in 2019 by protégés of AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton (an investor in the startup) and Jeff Dean, has also recruited a big name as its vice-president of engineering and machine learning: Bill MacCartney, former director of proactive intelligence at Apple Inc., who will open the company’s new Silicon Valley office. Tiger offers “founder-friendly” terms to those it believes can become market leaders, including big dollars at rich valuations, fast-closing times, and no request for board seats or other conditions usually demanded by venture capitalists. Others include Raquel Urtasun’s self-driving technology startup Waabi Innovation Inc., Deep Genomics, led by Brendan Frey, and semiconductor developer Untether AI Corp., co-founded by Martin Snelgrove. “In the same way language pervades each and every aspect of our lives, the application for NLP will follow suit in the digital world.” In recent months, Cohere has announced general access to its software developer tools, entered into a partnership with Google Cloud to use its supercomputing infrastructure and doubled its employee count to about 70.