The Toronto specialist in Artificial Intelligence Cohere is in Montreal. The company which at its beginnings played elbow with American rivals like Anthropic and Openai formalizes the opening of an office in the Quebec metropolis where it hopes to hire a few dozen employees over the next year.
The arrival of Cohere in Montreal will help to cement the city’s position in the World Ecosystem of AI. The company of 400 employees whose head office is in Toronto is one of its main investors of multinationals such as Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce and AMD. Founded in 2019, Cohere was also entitled to financial support from the Montreal technological fund Inovia Capital.
Its three co-founders are Canadian and are also ex-researchers in Google. This includes Aidan Gomez, the current COHERE CEO. “Canada has been at the heart of the advances in recent years in AI, and the position of leader in Montreal in research has many for many,” said Aidan Gomez to explain the Montreal investment of its company, which represents an investment of indefinite value.
COHERE is already counting on the presence of seven employees in Montreal. The opening of an on -site office will allow it to at least triple this number in the coming months. The company also hopes to get closer to the IA researchers community present in Montreal, including those of the Mila research center.
More than 100 million in income
Towards the end of 2022, when the first generative AI models experienced a popularity as sudden as explosive, cohere technology was regularly cited as one of the best, alongside those of young technological shoots like the American Anthropic and Openai, or the French Mistral.
To distinguish itself from its rivals, Cohere subsequently made a turn to business services, which at the end of 2024 gave it a valuation of approximately 5.5 billion (7.5 billion CAD), less spectacular than the 150 billion (200 billion CAD) that was worth at the same time Openai, but which nevertheless allowed him to quickly generate his first income.
Last May, the Reuters news agency estimated that Cohere had doubled at 100 millionus (135 million CAD) its annualized income, compared to the previous year. The key to this growth is an AI tool called North and intended for the labor market.
Among Cohere customers are companies like the RBC, LG Electronics and Fujitsu bank.
Naturally, this announcement is delighted by key players in the Montreal sector of AI. “This expansion is very good news for our ecosystem which sends the message to businesses around the world that Canada is a destination of choice where to create technologies of latest CRI,” said president of Mila Valérie Pisano.
A Manager and Multilingual AI
Without giving an amount, COHERE indicates that this expansion in Montreal has been allowed thanks to the Canadian strategy on sovereign calculation capacity for AI, which has an envelope of 2 billion to support “initiatives that will endow the research environment and companies in the AI ​​domain with tools required to stand out worldwide”.
COHERE hopes to increase its presence in economic sectors such as finance, health and public procurement. It puts on this strongest presence in Montreal to strengthen the multilingual side of its technology, in particular its ability to operate both in French and English.
Its model also relies on “a level of security and confidentiality which is important for critical industries and government agencies which must manipulate sensitive information”. The fact of getting closer to Mila, founded by the Montreal researcher and leader of the Movement for an AI responsible for Yoshua Bengio, is no stranger to Cohere’s decision to set up more permanently in Montreal.
