Cohere Raises $40 Million in Series A Financing to Make Natural Language Processing Safe and Accessible to Any Business

TORONTO, Sept. 07, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cohere, a provider of cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) models, announced today that it has raised $40 million in series A financing led by Index Ventures with participation from Section 32, returning investor Radical Ventures and several global AI luminaries, including Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel, and Raquel Urtasun, among others. Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures, joins the board of Cohere. The new capital will be used to expand Cohere's team and accelerate the adoption of its platform.

Founded by two former Google Brain researchers and a founding engineer of Cortex, Cohere emerged from stealth in May with a mission to build machines that understand the world, and to make them safely accessible to all. Cohere's API, which is powered by models that have read hundreds of millions of web pages and learned to understand the meaning, sentiment and tone of the words we use, enables companies to deploy state-of-the-art NLP capabilities across their businesses without requiring supercomputing infrastructure or AI expertise. The NLP models at the core of Cohere's offering are based on a breakthrough AI technology called Transformers, and lead the industry in their versatility, with the ability to comprehend, compare and compose sophisticated text as well as continuously improve their own training data.

"Natural Language Understanding is the biggest technological opportunity of the next decade. Nearly all data generated by humans is in the form of language, but few companies today have the resources to leverage it," said Cohere's co-founder and CEO, Aidan Gomez, who co-authored the breakthrough paper "Attention is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture at the core of Cohere's platform. "At Cohere, we want to simplify the relationship between people and machines, eliminating the language barrier that prevents us from interacting with technology the way we interact with each other, paving the way for new opportunities for innovation and creativity."

"Cohere's deep technical expertise makes them the perfect team to bring NLP to the global marketplace," said Mike Volpi, co-founder of Index Ventures. "We look forward to working with Cohere as they democratize access to one of the most important technologies of our time."

About Cohere
Cohere's mission is to build machines that understand the world and make them safely accessible to all. Cohere provides access to cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP) through a powerful and easy to use API. Cohere's models are capable of composing, comparing and comprehending natural language, making it an unprecedented full stack NLP solution that radically reduces the cost for companies of all sizes to access leading AI models. Cohere has established an external Responsibility Council that ensures that the safe application of their technology remains the highest priority. Cohere is based in Toronto, Canada, and powers customers across the globe.

About Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a multi-stage venture capital firm founded to support the best and most ambitious entrepreneurs, wherever they emerge. With a global network and headquarters in London and San Francisco, Index has teamed up with founders in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Israel who are building the world's next great companies.

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