Cohere reached a $7 billion valuation one month after his final pay raise, and partnered with AMD

On Wednesday, Enterprise AI Model Maker Cohere said it raised an additional $100 million (upped its valuation to $7 billion) in an extension of the round announced in August. The August round was an overloaded round of $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation, the company said at the time.

Cohere also announced an interesting twist on the partnership. Competitor Openai has won up to $100 billion in investments from the largest GPU player, Nvidia, but Cohere has signed a deal with AMD, one of the investors.

The company’s complete suite of command family AI models, including command vision, translation and inference models, can now be run on AMD’s Instinct GPU, a competitor to NVIDIA GPUs. Additionally, AMD uses Cohere internally as a customer. However, the company has not abandoned support for Nvidia GPUs to provide strict support for AMD, the company told TechCrunch.

Cohere started out as a front runner for AI model races. It was co-founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, one of the authors of the “transformer” paper that created the modern generation AI boom.

But while the $7 billion to $7 billion valuation over six years would have been adored ten years ago, Cole has since been hidden by the blind rise of Openai and its closest competitor, humanity. For example, Openai reportedly valued at $500 billion last month, while humanity reached a $183 billion valuation earlier this month.

Having always focused on the enterprise market, Cohere markets to companies where AI sovereignty is now in the urgent hands: companies that maintain local control over their data and models, rather than leaving it in the hands of foreign entities. That’s why Canada’s Business Development Bank (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management (known for its Mexican and Iberian funds) were new investors in this fresh $100 million round, Cohere says.