Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez, and Martin Kon, president
Back in February, I chatted with Cohere cofounder and CEO Aidan Gomez about the fact that the Toronto-based company, which competes with OpenAI in the LLM space, was “crazy under the radar.”
It didn't take long for that to change: Three weeks ago, Cohere, founded in 2019 by Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, announced it had raised a fresh $270 million with participation from Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures and others — valuing the company at over $2 billion.
It felt like good timing to circle back with Gomez as well as Cohere's president, Martin Kon, to talk about the new funding. But the conversation turned out to be wide-ranging, from the company's cloud-agnostic stance and Gomez's take on Geoffrey Hinton's recent comments on AI risk to the future of LLMs and synthetic data. (Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Also, Sharon Goldman will moderate a conversation with Cohere's Frosst at VB Transform, on July 11 & 12 in San Francisco, a networking event for enterprise technology decision makers focused on how to embrace LLMs and generative AI.)
VentureBeat: Back in February, Aidan and I chatted about Cohere flying under the radar. Does it feel like that has totally changed now, thanks to the new funding?
