Cohere Bets on AI Sovereignty Over Scale

When Aidan Gomez talks about Cohere’s approach to artificial intelligence, he tends to focus less on model size or benchmarks and more on trust. “Privacy and security you cannot compromise on, you can’t go halfway,” he told the Financial Times last week. Cohere was founded in 2019 by a group of former Google researchers including Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst. The company has just raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation, according to its announcement. It does not build public chat apps. Instead it provides models and tools that companies can run on their own infrastructure. For organizations that handle regulated data, that difference matters. The idea is simple. Banks, hospitals and governments are not comfortable sending their most sensitive data to a third part