Cohere seeks a $20.5 billion valuation with Canada and Nvidia aboard

Cohere, a Toronto-based developer of AI models for businesses, has begun closing a new funding round at a reported $20.5 billion valuation. Canada and Nvidia are among the backers, while Cohere says the round is targeting up to 7 billion Canadian dollars and has completed an initial close—meaning investors have committed some capital, but the whole target is not necessarily in hand yet. Cohere’s appeal is not another consumer chatbot: it sells companies models and AI tools that can be tailored to their data and run with more control over where sensitive information goes. The raise matters because building and operating advanced models consumes huge amounts of expensive computing power, and the money could give Cohere more capacity to compete for enterprise customers against much larger AI rivals.