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Cohere has just hit a $7 billion valuation. This is just a month after they closed their raise and had a huge partnership with amd. I'm going to be talking about basically their valuation, where, how they got here, who their competitors are, why. Some people are not like, thrilled about this, which I think it's pretty phenomenal. And before we get into all of that, I wanted to mention, if you want to build AI tools without having to know code, I'd love for you to check out my startup, which is called AI Box AI. We've recently launched the Beta, our no code AI app builder, where you essentially can go and type in a prompt into our Vibe builder and tell it what type of tool you're trying to create. A newsletter, generate an article, summarize, or a holiday memo generator. I've been making a whole bunch of different things, but you type it in and it will chain together all of the different AI models, build prompts, build a front end UI and create something incredible for you so you can go check it out. You can also get access to all the top 40 different AI models where you can chat with them, like Chat GPT and Anthropic for only 20amonth. So all of that is over at AI Box AI. Go check it out. But let's get into the episode. So just on Wednesday, Cohere, which is really an enterprise AI model maker, I think a lot of people, they try to compare them to chat GPT, but it's not really chatGPT. They're specifically building AI models for the enterprise. They have raised an additional $100 million, which is really, really impressive. And this brought their valuation up to 7 billion. I'll also say that their round was oversubscribed. They announced it in August and it was an oversubscribed $500 million round. So it seems like, you know, they had a lot of appetite. They raised at a 6.8 billion valuation, oversubscribed to 500 million. And then it seems like they're like, all right, there's still a lot of demand. We'll go and take in another $100 million. So altogether it was around 600 million that they raised. And a little bit, you know, somewhere between 6.8 billion and 7 billion was the valuation for all of that. Cohere also just announced a really interesting partnership. So of course OpenAI just got a hundred billion investment from Nvidia. And So, you know, OpenAI is kind of like a big competitor, even though they're not directly competing, because Cohere is more focused on the enterprise, but OpenAI obviously serves enterprise as well. And so Cohere has actually just signed a deal with amd, one of Nvidia's big competitors, and it's also one of their investors. So right now, what the offer is that Cohere has, how they kind of set themselves apart, is that they have what they're calling a command family AI model. So they have command, vision, translate reasoning models, and they can all run on AMD's Instinct GPU on an Nvidia competitor, basically. And so it seems like they're. It's kind of interesting this time where you have these AI models that are not just trying to set themselves apart by, you know, who they're serving, but who they are using to power their models. And it seems by, you know, making an alliance with amd. And I'm sure you can still run Cohere on an Nvidia gpu, but by, by making it specifically so you can run this on AMD's Instinct GPU, AMD is happy and they're going to invest money into your company the same way that it feels like Nvidia basically gives money to every major AI startup because they. They want these companies to be running their AI models on Nvidia's GPUs. So Cohere is obviously not abandoning support for Nvidia's GPUs, they're just adding support for AMD, which not every AI model does that. What I will say that's interesting. Cohere actually was like one of the original front runners in the AI model race. I remember talking about them at the beginning. They were kind of up there with OpenAI Anthropic. You had Cohere and a lot of people talked about how they sort of fell off. Aiden Gomez is their co founder. He co founded it in 20 and he's also one of the authors on the famous Transformers paper. That really is what started this whole big AI race where everyone is, you know, attention is all you need is the name of the paper, but is outlining how to make these LLM models. And he was one of the authors on this specific paper. And so a lot of people have very high hopes for Cohere. I mean, they've raised, you know, a ton of money. They have a $7 billion valuation. What's interesting to me though is, is obviously like zero to $7 billion valuation in six years. That is absolutely insane in my opinion. And if you said that like 10 years ago, people would have been like, there's no way. Like, that's incredible. That's an amazing company. But I think Cohere definitely gets really overshadowed by just how fast OpenAI is growing. And also, anthropic, OpenAI was just recently had a valuation of $500 billion. So obviously, this is, you know, really, really massive. They. They're. You know, they were in talks to. To sell about $6 billion in their stock, and it was all happening in a $500 billion valuation. So when you have these $500 billion valuations and you're comparing this to $7 billion, people are like, you know, Cohere isn't growing as fast. And even if you compare that to anthropic, they hit $183 billion valuation in their series F, and they were actually raising $13 billion there, which is, honestly, it's pretty staggering to think. You know, you see Cohere, and they just raised 600 million, which, wow, that's a lot of money. But you're comparing this to, you know, in the same month, Anthropic is pulling in 13 billion. Like, it. It's. It's just crazy. These numbers are absolutely staggering. So I think that's why people down, like, talk down on Cohere. But obviously, it's growing at an incredible multiple. It's. It's a huge. You know, it's doing amazing things. What I will say, Cohere basically is always focused on the enterprise market. It markets itself as an. And basically to enterprises where AI sovereignty is really urgent. So, you know, local control of your data and models. Right. You're. You're running a lot of these things yourself rather than putting them into, you know, the hands of a foreign entity. And so because of that, they've gotten a lot of interest from a bunch of people. The Business Development bank of Canada, and, by the way, Cohere is a Canadian company, but the Business Development bank of Canada and Nexus Capital Management were new investors in this $100 million round that they just pulled in. And I think it's. It's interesting because Cohere definitely has a very unique market carved out for it. It's focusing very specifically on the enterprise. And, you know, I recently on the podcast talked to an investor in Cohere and asked them a little bit about their kind of their opinion on the company, because they. Cohere gets this reputation of, like, oh, man, they kind of dropped off. And something that was interesting that he said was, essentially, he's obviously really proud of the company, but he said, you just have to look at, like, the Multiple and the growth rate of the company. And perhaps it is not as big as like the headline companies, right? You, you have a handful of companies that are growing at insane rates. Like maybe the top five. You got Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic. And I mean you could, you could put products in this category too. Maybe even Google Gemini, right? Like, you basically like the top five biggest that are going crazy. But Cohere is doing a, it's addressing a very specific market. It's serving their customers. Their customers are very happy with what they're doing and they, they're still growing and raising a lot of money. And so it might not be like the insane rocket ship that no one has ever seen before, right? Like opening eyes. Growth feels just absolutely unprecedented. So when you compare it to, you know, that insane, completely unprecedented, it seems perhaps like smaller, but for a regular company, they're getting a great return. Like investors are happy, they're getting a great return and their customers are happy. They're, they're, you know, getting a lot of value out of it. You know, I am curious if Cohere could try to address a broader market and if they could get a lot of demand for it. I know for myself on my own platform AI box, I would basically for 20 bucks a month, you get access to all of the top AI models. And Cohere is, we have the latest Cohere models on our platform. So like you can embed them into any products. I think Cohere could probably do a lot of better job of putting a push and being more visible. It's just not a brand you see out there a lot. But at the end of the day it's a powerful company. We, I'll say like, basically I can see usage metrics of every AI model. Cohere is not incredibly popular on our platform. Not a lot of people use it. And so I know they have a lot of specific like use cases where you might be running this locally on your own hardware for different high, you know, high concern industries like legal or health care. But at the end of the day, I think that, I think they can still make a really big push to kind of have the general consumer use this. I think there's demand for more alternatives and more competition. And if they, I think more than just focusing on a specific customer, like a specific, you know, the enterprise, for example, I think if they, they kind of focus on a specific vertical of user and made their model better. Not just like, like our hardware can support the enterprise, but if they made basically kind of like Anthropic, where they made their model is literally better for writers. For example, Anthropic has a better tone and also Anthropic Claude is better for coders. They have Claude code where they kind of built the Claude code and kind of this tool that developers can plug into their whole data, their whole, their whole code base and it can write code for them. We use cloud code exclusively at Open or AI Box because it's just so much better at understanding everything going on and OpenAI doesn't really have a strong competitor to it, so. And I know there's Codex, but I'll, I'll spare you the cloud code Codex to bankrupt for, for the moment. In any case, I think Cohere could focus on a couple of these areas and I think they could see a lot of growth. I'll be curious to see what, what happens with them. But at the end of the day, do not count Cohere out. They're still alive and kicking. I'm happy to hear they're still raising more money. 600 million or. Yeah, $600 million is impressive in the last little bit. So we'll, we'll keep following them and see how this company grows.