Cohere has put a new price on Canada's best-known AI company. The Toronto developer of enterprise language models announced on October 29 the initial close of a Series E round that aims to raise as much as CAD $7 billion. If the full amount comes in, the company would be valued at CAD $35.7 billion, and Cohere describes the financing as the largest private raise ever by a Canadian technology firm.
The investor list mixes European industry, Canadian telecom money and the Canadian state. The companies of Schwarz Group, the German retail conglomerate behind Lidl and Kaufland, are leading. Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital and the Government of Canada join as new backers, while NVIDIA, Inovia Capital and Prosperity7 Ventures return. Cohere has not said how much has actually been committed at this first close, and Reuters, as carried by CBC, notes that no timeline for a final close was given.
Ottawa's piece is unusually direct. Prime Minister Mark Carney announced an equity investment of up to CAD $1.6 billion, to be paid in stages and tied to reporting on agreed conditions. According to the government release, Cohere commits to at least 1,000 new technical jobs in Canada and at least CAD $1.7 billion of additional computing infrastructure in the country by 2030, to keep its Canadian incorporation and headquarters, to fund research partnerships, and to continue its work with the Canadian AI Safety Institute. The Globe and Mail calls it a direct government stake of unprecedented size in a technology company.
The jump in value is steep. The Globe and Mail reports that Cohere was valued at roughly US$7 billion in a round in September of last year, and that only a month ago the company was telling investors it was in talks to raise up to US$3 billion at about US$20 billion. Cohere's own figures point to rapid but still modest scale: annual recurring revenue up 165% year over year at the end of the third quarter, and a customer base that grew twentyfold to 300 organizations. The company has not disclosed current revenue.
Cohere says the money will go to model development, products built for regulated industries and long-term compute capacity for training frontier-level enterprise models. In a co-founders' essay published alongside the announcement, Aidan Gomez, Nicholas Frosst and Ivan Zhang frame the goal as building a frontier AI company outside the United States and China, arguing that governments, banks and hospitals need systems they can inspect and run inside their own environments. They list near-term steps: finishing the Aleph Alpha combination and the AISLE purchase, launching a Cohere Cyber product for air-gapped and classified settings, shipping new models and starting frontier-scale training with allied partners.
The round lands as sovereign AI turns into an explicit industrial policy on both sides of the Atlantic. Schwarz Group previously backed Aleph Alpha, the German lab Cohere agreed to merge with, and German Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger welcomed the financing in Cohere's release. Carney made the announcement while hosting European Union leaders in Montreal.
The scale gap with rivals remains large. OpenAI and Anthropic already earn billions of dollars a year from enterprise and government customers, and the Globe notes that independent rankings place Cohere's models behind theirs on coding and cybersecurity, a gap Gomez has acknowledged. The headline valuation also depends on the round reaching its full target, which has not yet happened.