The Problem
Cohere's founding thesis in 2019 was specific: consumer-facing AI and enterprise AI were fundamentally different businesses that would require different products, different distribution, and different economics. Consumer AI would win on brand, virality, and end-user experience. Enterprise AI would win on data governance, on-premise deployment options, customisation, and — critically — the ability to run on customer infrastructure without leaking training data.
At the time, most of the venture capital going into AI was betting on consumer-facing platforms. Cohere's contrarian bet was that the durable, defensible AI business was the enterprise one. That thesis has been repeatedly tested and, per the company's continued fundraising and revenue growth, has continued to hold.
The Journey
Aidan Gomez's academic and research background is unusually distinguished for someone who started a company in his mid-twenties. As a Google Brain intern in 2017, he was one of the eight authors of the Attention Is All You Need paper that introduced the transformer architecture — the foundational innovation behind essentially every large language model built since.
He later pursued a doctorate at the University of Oxford. In 2019 he co-founded Cohere with Nick Frosst (also from Google Brain, and known for work with Geoffrey Hinton on capsule networks) and Ivan Zhang, based in Toronto.
Cohere's funding trajectory has been documented in The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, and Bloomberg. Investors including NVIDIA, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, Cisco, and Canadian public-market anchors have taken the company past a multi-billion-dollar valuation, though smaller than the consumer-focused frontier labs.
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