Cohere chief executive Aidan Gomez said the artificial intelligence startup hopes to make its public market debut soon, in what would be one of the first IPOs from an AI model maker.
Gomez said public market investors would be excited to have a pure play AI investment opportunity as opposed to investing by proxy through hyperscalers, a term referring to large cloud service providers like Amazon and Microsoft, reports Bloomberg.
Cohere, co-headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, is also open to considering a listing on the London Stock Exchange if there is enough investment capital, Gomez said. The startup raised funds at a $7 billion valuation in September.
Founded in 2019, Cohere focuses on building and selling customisable AI software to businesses rather than consumers and has worked to differentiate itself with an emphasis on highly secure systems that protect sensitive data. However, the AI model developer faces intensifying competition from better-funded rivals, including OpenAI and Anthropic, which are also targeting the enterprise market.
Cohere said it has reached $150 million in annualised revenue, a projection of a company’s sales over the course of a year based on recent performance. That is up from $100 million in May.
Burning through capital on chips
Other artificial intelligence startups are seeing strong revenue growth but burning through capital on chips, talent and data centres to support AI development. OpenAI previously indicated it would not be cash-flow positive until 2029.
By comparison, Gomez said Cohere is on a clear path to profitability. Asked if he expects Cohere to turn a profit before 2029, he said it would be sooner than that.
The company recently released the Command A series of frontier enterprise-grade AI models, including Command A Vision, Command A Reasoning and Command A Translate. The models are designed to excel at powering high-stakes agentic business applications with broad multilingual support for global teams, top-tier efficiency for private deployments requiring two or fewer GPUs, and strong accuracy with citations and reasoning chains of thought.
Cohere’s models integrate with North, its fully private and customisable agentic AI platform purpose-built for businesses and governments handling sensitive data. North-powered agents are transforming critical sectors, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, energy and government.
The company’s strategic focus is driving significant growth through partnerships with leading global enterprises, including Dell, RBC, Bell, LG CNS, Fujitsu, SAP and AMD. Cohere recently announced an expanded collaboration with AMD to provide customers with access to cutting-edge compute infrastructure.
Cohere recently hired Francois Chadwick, a former Uber Technologies executive, as its chief financial officer. The company secured an additional $100 million in September as part of a second close to its latest funding round. Investors include Business Development Bank of Canada, Nexxus Capital Management, AMD Ventures, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, Inovia, NVIDIA, Public Sector Pension Investment Board, Radical Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
