Prime Minister Mark Carney announces the federal government's investment in AI company Cohere, as Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez (left) and Evan Solomon, minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation (right), look on (photo by Alexis Aubin/AFP/Getty Images)
The Canadian government has announced an equity investment of up to $1.6 billion in Cohere, the enterprise AI company founded by former University of Toronto computer science students Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang.
The investment is part of a planned $7-billion fundraising round, led by Germany’s Schwarz Group, that also includes Nvidia and Bell Canada’s venture arm, CBC News reported. The financing values Toronto-based Cohere at $35.7 billion, making it the largest fundraise by a Canadian startup, according to the Globe and Mail.
Cohere, which builds secure AI systems for businesses and governments, has deep roots at U of T. Co-founders Gomez and Frosst are both former trainees of Nobel laureate and U of T University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, who is widely regarded the “godfather of AI.” In July, U of T partnered with Cohere, announcing a multi-year agreement to support the responsible adoption of AI across the university – a pillar of U of T President Melanie Woodin’s commitments.
In a statement, Woodin congratulated Cohere on the "historic" fundraise, adding she is "thrilled at their success and the ways in which Cohere is strengthening Toronto's reputation as a hub of global AI leadership."
At a press conference on Oct. 29, Prime Minister Mark Carney noted “the building blocks of AI were conceived in this country,” citing advancements including deep learning and neural language models. He pointed to the foundational contributions of “Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto, Richard Sutton in Edmonton, Yoshua Bengio, who founded Mila… and Aidan Gomez, a student at University of Toronto who helped write the paper behind today’s large language models and then came home to co-found Cohere.”
As part of the investment deal, Cohere will create at least 1,000 new high-paying Canadian technical jobs and commit at least $1.7 billion to additional computing infrastructure in Canada by 2030. It will also maintain its Canadian incorporation and headquarters, invest in research partnerships in Canada, create opportunities for students and recent graduates and continue working with the Canadian AI Safety Institute to champion the safe development and use of advanced AI.
“As a Canadian-headquartered company, we believe maintaining global AI leadership across public and private sectors is a national imperative,” Gomez, Cohere’s CEO, said in a government news release. “AI will supercharge economic productivity, fortify national security and future-proof Canada’s competitiveness. That's why building this technology and developing the next generation of AI talent right here in Canada is essential.”