Cohere: the Canadian maker of enterprise AI models

Roots in the Transformer

Cohere was founded in Toronto in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang. Aidan Gomez, the CEO, is one of the authors of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture behind today’s language models. The company now has offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Seoul and Berlin.

From the start, Cohere took a different path from OpenAI or Google: no consumer assistant, just models and tools for enterprises.

Model families built for document work

Cohere’s lineup reads like a complete processing pipeline:

• Command: generative models designed for agents, tool use and retrieval-augmented generation with source citations.
• Embed: models that turn text and images into embeddings for semantic search and classification.
• Rerank: reranking models that put the documents found by a search engine back in the right order.
• Aya: multilingual models from Cohere Labs’ open research.

On top of that come specialized models for document parsing (Parse), transcription (Transcribe) and translation. This combination explains Cohere’s place in internal search projects, where the right information has to be found before an answer is written.

Open weights for research, closed offering for business

Cohere’s approach is mixed. Cohere Labs, its open research lab launched in 2022, publishes open weights on Hugging Face, including for Command A. But those weights are under the CC-BY-NC license: non-commercial use only. For a paid product or service, you need a Cohere commercial plan.

How to access the models

• The Cohere API, using a key from the dashboard, documented at docs.cohere.com.
• Cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure, Oracle, Google Cloud).
• Private deployment on dedicated infrastructure, in a VPC or on-premises.
• North, the enterprise platform launched in 2025, which adds ready-made agents.

To see how Cohere compares with other model makers, browse our AI labs page or the profile of Mistral AI, another non-US player focused on businesses.