Cohere

Cohere is an AI company founded in Toronto, Canada, in 2019. One of its co-founders also co-authored the paper that laid the groundwork for today's AI.

What sets Cohere apart from other companies is who it sells to. It builds almost no chatbots for the general public. Instead, it targets banks, hospitals, and governments—places where data can't leave the premises—and builds models they can run directly on their own servers.

You might assume that a company serving enterprises would naturally keep its models closed, but that's not quite the case. Cohere has released its flagship models for anyone to download. What the company really sells isn't the model itself so much as "making it run safely inside our walls."

In August 2026, Cohere released a small vision model with 2.4 billion parameters (North Micro Vision). The idea is to give companies a lightweight "eye" for reading documents and screens that runs inside their own servers. Rather than competing to build the biggest models, the company's strategy of "making it run inside" shows up even in how small its models are.

When you see "Cohere signed a contract with a government," it often doesn't mean they delivered a chatbot—it usually means they embedded a model in a way that keeps the data from ever leaving the premises.