Enterprise AI company Cohere just raised another $100 million, pushing its valuation to $7 billion just a month after closing a $500 million round. But the real story isn't the money - it's the strategic partnership with AMD that puts the company squarely at odds with OpenAI's recent Nvidia alliance.
Cohere is making some bold moves in the enterprise AI space, and timing couldn't be more interesting. The Toronto-based company announced Wednesday it's closed an additional $100 million funding round, bumping its valuation to $7 billion from the $6.8 billion it hit just last month during what the company called an oversubscribed $500 million round. But the fresh capital is just the appetizer - the main course is a strategic partnership with AMD that's positioning Cohere as a direct alternative to the OpenAI-Nvidia axis that's been dominating headlines. The partnership isn't just about compatibility. Cohere's entire Command-family suite, including its vision, translate, and reasoning models, will now run natively on AMD's Instinct GPUs - the chip maker's answer to Nvidia's AI dominance. More intriguingly, AMD will also become an internal customer of Cohere's enterprise AI tools, creating a feedback loop that could accelerate both companies' AI ambitions. The timing feels deliberate. Just days after OpenAI announced its up-to-$100 billion investment from Nvidia, Cohere is essentially saying 'we've got an alternative path.' The company made clear to TechCrunch that it's not abandoning Nvidia GPU support entirely, but the AMD partnership signals a strategic bet on diversification in an increasingly consolidated AI hardware landscape. Cohere's pedigree runs deep in the AI world. Co-founder Aidan Gomez was one of the authors of the seminal Transformer paper that launched the current generative AI revolution back in 2017. When the company launched in 2019, it looked like a frontrunner in what was then a much smaller AI model race. Fast forward to 2025, and the landscape looks dramatically different. While Cohere's zero-to-$7 billion journey in six years would have been mind-blowing a decade ago, it's now overshadowed by the meteoric rise of OpenAI and Anthropic. was reportedly last month, while hit an earlier this month. But Cohere isn't trying to compete directly with those consumer-focused AI giants. Instead, it's doubling down on what it calls 'AI sovereignty' - helping enterprises maintain local control over their data and AI models rather than depending on foreign cloud providers. This strategy is resonating internationally, with the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management joining as new investors in this latest round. The Canada connection isn't coincidental. As governments worldwide grapple with AI regulation and data sovereignty concerns, Cohere's Canadian roots and enterprise focus offer an alternative to US-dominated AI platforms. The company's messaging around keeping 'local control of data and models, rather than putting them in the hands of a foreign entity' speaks directly to these concerns. What makes this AMD partnership particularly interesting is the hardware angle. While most enterprise AI discussions focus on models and applications, Cohere is making a bet that hardware diversity will become increasingly important. If AMD can deliver competitive AI chips while offering enterprises more supplier choice, Cohere could benefit from being early to that ecosystem. The enterprise market Cohere targets is also different from the consumer AI space that gets most of the attention. Enterprise customers often prioritize reliability, compliance, and data control over cutting-edge capabilities. They're willing to pay premium prices for solutions that integrate with their existing systems and meet strict security requirements.
