Cohere, a $5.5B Canadian A.I. Startup, Is Quietly Working with Peter Thiel’s Palantir

Since bursting into the A.I. scene five years ago, the Canadian startup Cohere has emerged as a rival to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Backed by tech giants like Nvidia (NVDA) and Salesforce, it’s managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster its mission to develop A.I. models for enterprises. Cohere’s partners include software giant Oracle, Japanese telecom company Fujitsu and, as first reported by TechCrunch this week, the data analytics company Palantir.

Founded more than two decades ago by Peter Thiel, Palantir provides data analytics software for major businesses and government agencies. While Cohere has yet to officially announce the partnership, a segment during Palantir’s developer conference in November detailed its work with the startup, which has already seen Cohere’s models deployed to Palantir customers. Cohere and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

Cohere’s partnership with Palantir appears to focus on Palantir’s Foundry platform, which serves corporate clients. Billy Trend, a senior software engineer at Cohere, noted his excitement “about working with Palantir” during the conference. He discussed the startup’s engagement with an unnamed Palantir customer who had “strict constraints” on data storage and was looking to conduct its inference in Arabic—a task Trend described as “a great opportunity” for Cohere’s multilingual capabilities.

Headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, Cohere was established in 2019 by former Google researchers Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang and Aiden Gomez. Gomez notably co-authored the 2017 “Attention is All You Need Paper,” which led to pivotal breakthroughs in machine learning. Instead of pushing consumer products or advancements in artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) research like its competitors, Cohere has positioned itself as a startup focused on building tailored models for enterprise clients like McKinsey and Deloitte.

Its low-profile strategy has attracted the attention of corporate investors like Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu, all of whom participated in a $500 million funding round in July that valued the startup at $5.5 billion—more than doubling its previous valuation of $2.1 billion a year earlier. Other backers of Cohere include renowned A.I. academics Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li.

Some of Cohere’s largest competitors have becoming increasingly cozy with defense clients in recent months. In November, Palantir announced plans to team up with Anthropic and Amazon (AMZN) in a partnership that will provide Anthropic’s A.I. models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. Earlier this month, OpenAI inked a military deal with the defense company Anduril that will see its technology infused into anti-drone systems. Between August of 2022 and 2023, the value of A.I.-related federal contracts soared 150 percent to a staggering $675 million, according to a study from the Brookings Institute.