Cohere – Why we invested
Cohere – Why we invested
In board rooms across companies of all sizes, a strikingly consistent conversation is taking place: What is our generative AI strategy? How are large language models (LLMs) impacting our business? How are we taking advantage of these new capabilities? These conversations are happening around the globe from San Francisco to Seoul, Los Angeles to London, and Boston to Berlin.
Each day brings more clarity on the significant value that AI can bring to enterprises. The democratization of productivity is revolutionizing industries that were once resistant to change.
Importantly, it is also becoming clear that companies that are “AI-first” can both better protect their current market share and unlock billions of dollars of value.
While Big Tech and others are trying to seize the moment and solidify their place in the AI ecosystem, the reality is that most companies are not “AI-first.” This raises the question: How can global enterprises outside of Big Tech take advantage of the opportunity for mission-critical AI use cases, while meeting IT deployment needs and upholding their data security and compliance commitments? We would like to introduce Cohere.
Aidan Gomez, CEO & Co-founder of Cohere and co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”, the influential paper that introduced the transformer algorithm, is on a mission to bring AI to all enterprises. Cohere is at the forefront of this empowerment, as the leading AI platform for enterprises, offering data-secure deployment options in companies’ existing cloud environments, customization, and customer support. Specifically, the Cohere platform is:
● Cloud Agnostic: Cohere is built to be available on every cloud, deployed inside a customers’ existing cloud environment, virtual private cloud (VPC), or even on-site, to meet companies where their data is.
● Compliant: Compliant with global data protection and security frameworks (SOC2, GDPR,etc.), addressing safety and security as a top priority.
● Customizable: Cohere works hands-on with customers to tailor solutions to their unique needs, with an ecosystem of consulting and system integrator partners to help enterprises at any stage in their AI journey.
● Industry Leading: Stanford’s most recent language model evaluation ranked Cohere’s Command model highly in accuracy over comparable models. Meanwhile, Cohere recently released the first-ever publicly available multilingual understanding model trained on authentic data from native speakers; it’s equipped to read and understand over 100 of the world’s most commonly spoken languages.
One of the key initiatives to bring these top-notch LLMs capabilities to the hands of enterprises is Cohere’s conversational AI enterprise agent. Grounded in an enterprise’s own data, the technology empowers employees giving them superhuman capabilities. Most importantly, it does so in a secure, reliable, and efficient manner. We have witnessed first hand the excitement of many leading enterprises as they analyze and explore these transformative capabilities and discover how Cohere partners with companies to actualize these cutting-edge tools. The conversation moves beyond the value of pure efficiency gains and to new revenue opportunities and pricing models that personalization and information democratization can bring to enterprises.
Unlocking the full potential of generative AI in enterprises requires more than just a ground breaking vision and cutting-edge technology. The real magic lies in the remarkable team behind it all. The Co-founders Aidan, Nick, and Ivan possess an extraordinary level of AI expertise and are complemented by a world-class technical team. Having joined the ranks are President & COO Martin Kon, who previously served as CFO of YouTube; CPO Jaron Waldman, former Head of Geo at Apple; and Chief Scientist Phil Blunsom, Oxford ML professor and former Head of NLP at DeepMind.
“We are thrilled to collaborate closely with DTCP and their impressive roster of LPs in the telecom and broader German and European sectors — especially given Cohere’s significant presence in the UK and Germany, and that our CEO, Chief Scientist, and President are all European citizens,” said Martin Kon, President & COO, Cohere. “Cohere is focused on serving the most sophisticated, demanding and respected enterprises at scale. This funding round will accelerate our ability to help those enterprises leverage Generative AI to create strategic advantage and business value, safely in their data environment, all around the world.”
At DTCP Growth, our mandate is to invest in enterprise-focused companies that possess a unique blend of top-tier talent, cutting-edge technology, and are best positioned to execute on a global market opportunity. We invested in Cohere because we believe they possess these three key strengths and can best bring this technology to enterprises operating on a global scale. Our unique fund structure gathers a combination of global institutional investors and strategic investors including Deutsche Telekom amongst others. At DTCP Growth, we bring to bear our data-driven approach to help portfolio companies build repeatability and leverage our access to the Global 2000 to accelerate a company’s vision and look forward to working closely with Cohere as they take their message global.
It is with great excitement that we announce we have joined Cohere on this journey! If you share our enthusiasm for the democratization of AI and want to collaborate with the talented individuals at Cohere, there are many opportunities for exceptional individuals to contribute! If you are exploring the implementation of AI-first products tools for your organization or seeking to unlock tremendous value across your enterprise, do not hesitate to contact us as we are here to assist you and are happy to provide insights on how Cohere can help.
DTCP
June 2023