44. Cohere

Founders: Aidan Gomez (CEO), Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang
Launched: 2019
Headquarters: Toronto
Funding: $175 million
Valuation: N/A
Key technologies: Artificial intelligence, deep neural networks/deep learning, explainable AI, machine learning
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 0

Generative AI is all over the news these days, but Cohere is taking a slightly different tack.

Rather than offering the service to the public a la ChatGPT from this year's top disruptor OpenAI, the startup focuses on enterprise customers. The company's platform lets developers and businesses of all sizes — even those without expertise in machine learning — integrate AI features like copywriting, search, conversational AI, summarization or content moderation in their company's mobile app or service platform.

"We want to build that toolkit that's accessible to any dev," co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez told CNBC last June.

Gomez, along with co-founder Nick Frosst, came from Google Brain, an exploratory deep learning artificial intelligence team that's now part of Google Research. While at Alphabet's Google, Gomez and other researchers helped to develop a new method of natural language processing — transformers — that enable systems to grasp a word's context more accurately.

In November, the company announced a partnership with Google's cloud platform to provide the computer power for Cohere to train its models. It also became available on Amazon SageMaker, a machine-learning platform, earlier this year.

Current customers include global streaming platforms, apparel companies, and companies that use the platform to streamline customer service or improve content moderation capabilities. The company is also reportedly planning to introduce a new product that, like ChatGPT, lets enterprise customers generate text and refine the output. More recently, it partnered with LivePerson, a chatbot maker, to adapt its large language models for enterprise use.

As interest in generative AI heats up, so too does competition for funding and talent. AI startups like Cohere, along with Adept, Inflection and Anthropic, are vying for resources. Early last year, Cohere said it raised $125 million in a series B round and opened a new engineering center in Palo Alto. It was also reportedly in talks with Google for a $200 million investment. In the same year, the company added two high-profile AI scientists from DeepMind, announced the opening of a new office in London, and named Martin Kon, the former CFO of YouTube, as its president and chief operating officer.