TORONTO, Feb. 16, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cohere, the natural language processing (NLP) platform enabling broad access to cutting-edge language generation and understanding technology, announced today that it has raised $125M USD in a Series B round led by Tiger Global, with participation from founding investor Radical Ventures and returning investors Index Ventures and Section 32. The latest fundraise brings Cohere’s total funding raised to date to over $170M USD. Cohere has also announced that Bill MacCartney has joined as Vice President of Engineering and Machine Learning, and will spearhead the opening of the company’s new Palo Alto office.
Prior to Cohere, Bill was Director of Proactive Intelligence at Apple, leading a team of more than 120 scientists and engineers in developing models for predicting user intentions and actions. He also continues his work as a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford, where he co-developed and has taught a grad-level NLP course over the past twelve years.
“Cohere has been able to solve one of the most difficult obstacles to the broad adoption of NLP technology: ease of use,” said Bill MacCartney. “Today, we’re well-positioned for success as we scale up operations and expand our international footprint. Alongside an exceptional leadership team and brilliant engineers, I look forward to contributing to the team’s work in delivering safe and effective NLP models.”
Cohere has experienced significant growth over the past eight months, having announced general access to its API, a $40M Series A, and a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to leverage its supercomputing infrastructure. Headcount has also doubled and platform usership has increased by over 800% since the Series A raise, with companies testing and adopting the technology. The team continues to add new capabilities to the platform, most recently allowing users to fine-tune BERT models to their specific needs.
“For the first time, we've brought to market an effective NLP solution that is practical, accessible, and safe,” said Cohere’s co-founder and CEO, Aidan Gomez. “With the opening of our new Palo Alto office, we're continuing to scale in all directions, bringing aboard new talent and rapidly increasing our compute capacity to train our next generation large language models (LLMs). We’re very excited to welcome Bill – he knows what it takes to build and scale a highly technical product, and his addition to our team will help galvanize our growth.”
Cohere’s technology can be applied to any industry. Its intuitive API is powered by models that have read hundreds of millions of pages of text and learned to understand the meaning, sentiment, and tone of language down to syntax, semantics, and context––enabling companies to derive insights and streamline language-intensive tasks. With Cohere, companies of any size can leverage leading NLP capabilities in their operations without requiring supercomputing infrastructure or AI expertise.
“Understanding human language is the next frontier for artificial intelligence,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “Cohere has effectively packaged together an easy-to-use API that allows any developer to build upon Cohere’s LLMs, fine-tuning them for their specific needs. In the same way language pervades each and every aspect of our lives, the application of NLP will follow suit in this digital world.”
Cohere’s momentum signals the dawning of a new era in NLP applications. By lowering the barrier to adoption for NLP, the company has become a catalyst for one of the most exciting advancements in artificial intelligence. Once a pipe dream for general developers, Cohere continues to expand NLP accessibility and refine its cutting-edge API to be leveraged across any company and industry.
About Cohere
Cohere's mission is to build machines that understand the world and make them safely accessible to all. Cohere provides access to cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP) through a powerful and easy-to-use API. Cohere's models are capable of composing, comparing, and comprehending natural language, making it an unprecedented full-stack NLP solution that radically reduces the cost for companies of all sizes to access leading large language models (LLMs). Cohere is based in Toronto, Canada, and powers customers across the globe.
About Tiger Global
Tiger Global Management, LLC is an investment firm that focuses on private and public companies in the global Internet, software, consumer, and payments industries. The firm's private equity strategy was launched in 2003 and has invested in hundreds of companies across more than 30 countries, in all stages of funding – from Series A to pre-IPO. The venture business aims to partner with dynamic entrepreneurs operating market-leading growth companies; examples include JD.com, Meituan, Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, Peloton, Credit Karma, Toast, Stripe, ByteDance, Stone, Warby Parker, Flipkart, Despegar, Ola and DiDi. Tiger Global was founded in 2001 and is based in New York with affiliate offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore and Bangalore. For more information on Tiger Global Management, visit: https://www.tigerglobal.com/.
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