Cohere, an AI startup in Toronto, has raised $250 million in new funding, two people familiar with the situation said, in another sign of feverish interest in a new type of AI technology.
People said the deal valued Queer at around $2 billion. Investors include Internet software giant Salesforce, chipmaker Nvidia, Toronto venture capital firm Inovia Capital, and Silicon Valley Index Ventures.
The startup, founded in 2019, previously raised $170 million from investors including Index, Tiger Global, and well-known AI researchers Jeffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Pieter Abbeel.
Cohere is building technology that other companies can use to deploy chatbots, search engines, and other AI-powered products. It’s among a small group of companies — including tech industry giants and a few startups — building technology that can rival systems under development at OpenAI, a San Francisco startup that launched the AI boom in November. With ChatGPT chatbot version.
Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, two Canadian researchers who worked on artificial intelligence at Google, and Ivan Zhang, an entrepreneur from Toronto. Mr. Gomez was among the researchers at Google who published a major paper that helped lead to ChatGPT and similar technologies.
ChatGPT has captured the imagination of millions of people with its ability to do things like answer questions, write term papers and poetry, and generate computer code. With chatbots growing in popularity, the tech industry has focused on generative artificial intelligence — technologies that can generate text, images, and other media in response to short prompts.
Many companies are exploring the fringes of this new field, but only a few have the resources to build the technologies from the ground up. These companies have an unusual mix of experienced researchers, huge ambition, and large sums of money.
Although investors have been reluctant to fund other startups, they have poured money into a few companies at the forefront of generative AI.
In February, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, bringing its total investment in the company to $13 billion. And in March, Character.ai, another startup that builds online chatbots, raised $150 million in a funding round that valued the company at $1 billion.
The result of more than a decade of research within companies like OpenAI, generative AI companies are poised to reshape everything from Internet search engines like Microsoft Bing to digital teachers.