Artificial intelligence company Cohere Inc. laid off about 20 employees on Oct. 26, a day after announcing its closure. $500 Million Funding Round The Toronto-based company was valued at $5.5 billion.
The company had hired about 250 employees at the beginning of the year and aims to double its headcount by the end of 2024. The layoffs affected multiple Cohere offices; the company also has locations in San Francisco, New York and London.
“The closing of our D round gives us a clear vision for Cohere's future, which required some internal restructuring. We will continue to aggressively hire talent to provide enterprises with the most accurate, secure and private multilingual AI solutions on the market,” said Josh Gartner, head of public relations at Cohere.
Mid-level management was also affected by the layoffs, according to a person familiar with the matter, who The Globe and Mail declined to name because the people were not authorized to speak publicly.
Cohere on Monday announced a Series D funding round led by the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, with participation from Cisco Systems, AMD Ventures, Fujitsu, Magnetar Capital and Export Development Canada as new investors.
Cohere's valuation has more than doubled since its last funding round in June 2023 as investor interest in generative AI shows few signs of slowing.
Cohere builds large-scale language models (LLMs) that power chatbots and other AI applications. The company competes with big AI investors OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta Platforms Inc. Cohere focuses on enterprise customers and builds models tailored to their business needs, including how to reduce errors and illusions that cause problems when LLMs create information.
The company is considered a leader in Canada's AI field. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland both congratulated Cohere on the funding deal on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on Monday. “You are building a bright future for the industry here,” Trudeau wrote.
