A collection of companies with Bay Area ties have invested in a $270 million funding round for an artificial intelligence startup.
Nvidia Corp., the Santa Clara-based AI chip giant; Salesforce Inc., the San Francisco-based enterprise software titan; and Oracle Corp., the enterprise software maker that was formerly based in Redwood City and still has a major campus there, all invested in the deal for Cohere Inc. Led by Inovia Capital, a Canadian venture firm that has an office in San Francisco, the round valued the startup at $2.2 billion, according to Reuters.
Based in Toronto, Cohere is developing generative AI technology for enterprise customers. An advanced version of AI technology, generative AI can mimic human-created text, images and software code, often in response to simple questions or commands.
"We are at the beginning of a new era driven by accelerated computing and generative AI," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release Thursday announcing the investment. "The team at Cohere has made foundational contributions to generative AI. Their service will help enterprises around the world harness these capabilities to automate and accelerate."
Cohere has been attracting attention this year as a potential rival to OpenAI LLC, the San Francisco company behind the ChatGPT chatbot that attracted a $10 billion multi-year investment from Microsoft Corp. Cohere was founded by former top researchers at Google LLC, a connection that has raised questions in the media about the startup's possible ties to the Alphabet Inc.-owned company.
But Cohere doesn't want to have the same kind of link to any company that OpenAI now has to Microsoft, Martin Kon, its president, told Reuters.
"We're independent," Kon said. "We did not and we would not take a huge check from a single company, especially not a huge check from a single cloud provider, because we think that would constrain us from doing the right things for our business and our enterprise customers."
