Cohere
Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang — Aidan Gomez is a co-author of the original transformer paper. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Cohere focuses exclusively on enterprise use cases and does not operate a consumer product. Its Command R+ model is optimised for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in business contexts. Cohere is headquartered in Toronto and has raised over $445 million. It is notable as a serious enterprise AI company that has avoided the governance controversies of its peers by maintaining a clear commercial focus without consumer-facing products that attract public scrutiny.
AI Models
Command R+
Released in April 2024, Command R+ is Cohere's flagship model for enterprise retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It was designed specifically for business use cases — it cites its sources when using retrieved documents, supports tool use and function calling, and is available for deployment in enterprise private cloud environments. Cohere's approach contrasts with the general-purpose pretrained models from OpenAI and Anthropic: Command R+ is optimised for a specific task (enterprise knowledge work) rather than general capability.