Artificial intelligence startup Cohere, backed by investors including Oracle Corp. and Nvidia Corp., is working with banks to raise a fresh funding round, just a few months after its last one, according to people familiar with the matter.
Toronto-based Cohere is being advised by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on the potential round, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private.
Talks are early and details of the round, such as what amount the company is seeking, haven’t been set.
In June, Cohere raised $270 million from a mix of investors at a valuation of up $2.2 billion, Bloomberg News reported. The company is seeking a higher valuation in the current round, one of the people said.
Representatives for Cohere, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declined to comment. People familiar with the company’s thinking said that despite the last round being oversubscribed, Cohere hoped that hiring bankers would make the fundraising process more efficient.
Founded in 2019, Cohere builds large language models — software trained on massive swaths of the internet to analyze and generate text – and customizes them for users. Companies can use its models to do things like summarize customer emails or help write website copy. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Aidan Gomez previously worked at Google, where he was a co-author of a 2017 landmark paper in AI research titled Attention is All You Need, which led to advances in the ways computers analyze and generate text.
The Information reported on Aug. 22 that Tiger Global Management was close to selling a stake in Cohere in a deal that would have valued the company at about $3 billion.
