Since breaking into the AI space five years ago, Canadian startup Cohere has emerged as a rival to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Backed by tech giants such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Salesforce, it has managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to further its mission of developing AI models for businesses. Cohere’s partners include software giant Oracle, Japanese telecommunications company Fujitsu and, as first reported by TechCrunch this week, data analytics firm Palantir.
Founded more than two decades ago by Peter Thiel, Palantir provides data analytics software for large enterprises and government agencies. Although Cohere has not officially announced the partnership, a segment during Palantir’s developer conference in November detailed its work with the startup, which has already seen Cohere’s models shipped to Palantir customers. Cohere and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.
Cohere’s partnership with Palantir appears to focus on Palantir’s Foundry platform, which serves corporate customers. Billy Trend, senior software engineer at Cohere, noted his excitement about “working with Palantir” during the conference. He negotiated a startup relationship with an unnamed Palantir client that had “hard constraints” on data storage and was looking to do its bidding in Arabic—a career trend described as a “great opportunity” for Cohere’s multilingual skills.
Headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, Cohere was founded in 2019 by former Google researchers Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang and Aiden Gomez. Gomez co-authored the landmark 2017 “Attention Is All You Need Paper,” which led to significant breakthroughs in machine learning. Instead of pushing consumer products or advances in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research like its competitors, Cohere has positioned itself as a startup focused on building custom models for business clients like McKinsey and Deloitte.
Its low-key strategy has drawn attention from corporate investors like Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu, all of which participated in a $500 million funding round in July that valued the startup at $5.5 billion—more than double its previous valuation of $2.1 billion a year. before. Other Cohere supporters include well-known AI academics Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li.
Some of Cohere’s biggest competitors have become increasingly cozy with defense customers in recent months. In November, Palantir announced plans to partner with Anthropic and Amazon ( AMZN ) in a partnership that will provide Anthropic AI models to US defense and intelligence agencies. Earlier this month, OpenAI struck a military deal with defense company Anduril that will see its technology incorporated into anti-drone systems. Between August 2022 and 2023, the amount of government contracts related to AI increased by 150 percent to a staggering $675 million, according to a study by the Brookings Institute.
