Cohere opens a Series E targeting up to CAD $7 billion

Cohere announced the initial close of a Series E funding round targeting up to CAD $7 billion, led by Schwarz Group with participation from Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital, Inovia Capital, NVIDIA, Prosperity7 Ventures, and the Government of Canada. This is an initial close toward that target, not funds already fully raised. The company's co-founders framed the raise as an attempt to build a frontier AI company based outside the US and China.

In the accompanying blog post, Cohere argued against what it calls 'frontier fatalism,' the idea that only a couple of countries and a handful of companies can lead in frontier AI, and pointed to figures showing that more than 70% of open-model tokens served through OpenRouter earlier in the year came from Chinese models, up from about 3% fourteen months earlier. Cohere said it plans to use the funds to build frontier models, a secure platform for institutions to run AI on their own infrastructure, and cyber defense capabilities, pointing to its planned acquisition of AISLE (to become Cohere Cyber) as an example of combining efficient models with specialized security tooling.

The post also cited government-level investment behind the effort, including Canada's roughly C$5 billion in AI spending since 2017 and Germany's €5 billion national AI strategy since 2018.

Why it matters

A large, government-backed funding round signals a push for AI alternatives built and controlled outside the US and China, which matters for enterprises with data sovereignty requirements.

Source: Cohere