Company of the day
Enterprise AI platforms · Toronto, Canada
Founded by a co-author of the paper that made modern AI possible, Cohere bet on enterprise and government customers over consumer chat - a narrower, less visible strategy than OpenAI's or Anthropic's, aimed at organisations that need models running on their own infrastructure.
Cohere was founded in Toronto in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst. Gomez was a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need", the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture underlying essentially every large language model since, including his own company's. Cohere focuses squarely on enterprise customers rather than a consumer chatbot, selling large language models for retrieval-augmented generation, search and agentic workflows deployed inside customers' own infrastructure.
The company has positioned itself as the enterprise-security-conscious alternative to consumer-facing labs, emphasising private and on-premises deployment options for regulated industries and governments - a pitch closely aligned with Canada's own push to build sovereign AI capacity.
Command
Enterprise-focused large language model family.
North
Cohere's enterprise AI agent and search platform.
The maker of ChatGPT and the GPT model family, and the company most responsible for the current wave of consumer generative AI.
AI safety-focused lab behind the Claude model family, founded by former OpenAI researchers.
Alphabet's unified AI research and product lab, formed from the 2023 merger of DeepMind and Google Brain, and the maker of the Gemini model family.
