Cohere is a Toronto-based enterprise AI company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, one of the co-authors of the original Transformer architecture paper, along with Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst. The company focuses specifically on enterprise and government customers rather than consumer products, offering large language models, retrieval and search tools, and deployment options including private and on-premises hosting for customers with strict data residency or security requirements.
In April 2026, Cohere acquired Aleph Alpha, a German enterprise AI company, in a deal that created a combined organization valued at approximately $20 billion, reinforcing Cohere's positioning around sovereign and enterprise-controlled AI deployment as an alternative to consumer-oriented frontier labs.