Latest news with #NickFrosst
CNA
2 days ago
- Business
- CNA
AI startup Cohere valued at $6.8 billion in latest fundraising, hires Meta exec
Canadian AI startup Cohere was valued at $6.8 billion following its latest $500 million funding round, as it seeks to expand its market share in a highly competitive industry of selling AI to enterprises. The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, with participation from existing investors AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments and Salesforce Ventures, among others. Unlike most AI companies such as OpenAI and Meta's Llama, which are focused on broad foundational models, Cohere builds enterprise-specific AI models. "The funding allows us to expand more globally, branch off into different modalities, as you saw us launch a command vision model recently, and keep building secure AI for the enterprise," Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere, said in an interview. Alongside the fundraise, Cohere appointed Joelle Pineau, former vice president of AI Research at Meta , as chief AI officer, and Francois Chadwick, former executive at Uber and Shield AI, as chief financial officer. Pineau, who was with Meta for eight years and had led Meta's Fundamental AI Research group since 2023, left in May, at a time when the tech giant is aggressively investing and building out a new AI research team. In January, Cohere launched North, a ChatGPT-style tool designed to help knowledge workers with tasks such as document summarization. The company said it will use the new funding to advance agentic AI that can help businesses and governments operate more efficiently. The fundraise comes amid a broader surge in AI financing, as private equity and Big Tech channel capital into startups in pursuit of strong returns from innovative AI products.
Yahoo
06-08-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Cohere's new AI agent platform, North, promises to keep enterprise data secure
AI agent tools promise to siphon out some of the drudgery from daily workflows, but most organizations are hesitant to adopt them yet, harboring a pressing concern: data security. Large enterprises with trade secrets, companies in highly regulated industries, and government agencies have thought more than twice about bringing in AI tools out of concern that their — or worse, their customers' — data could inadvertently be compromised, or used to train foundation models. Canadian AI firm Cohere is taking aim at alleviating those concerns with its new AI agent platform dubbed North, which promises to enable private deployment so that enterprises and governments can keep their and customers' data safe behind their own firewalls. 'LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to,' Nick Frosst, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, said during a demo of North. 'If we want LLMs to be as useful as possible, they have to access that useful data, and that means they need to be deployed in [the customer's] environment.' Instead of using enterprise cloud platforms like Azure or AWS, Cohere says it can install North on an organization's private infrastructure so that it never sees or interacts with a customer's data. North can run on an organization's on-premise infrastructure, hybrid clouds, VPCs, or air-gapped environments, Frosst said. 'We can deploy literally on a GPU in a closet that they might have somewhere,' he explained, adding that North was designed to run on as few as two GPUs. Cohere claims North also includes security protocols like granular access control, agent autonomy policies, continuous red-teaming, and third-party security tests. And, it meets international compliance standards like GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001. More than private deployments Cohere, which has so far raised $970 million, most recently at a $5.5 billion valuation, said it has already piloted North with some customers such as RBC, Dell, LG, Ensemble Health Partners, and, as TechCrunch reported last year, Palantir. North mirrors many AI agent platforms right out of the box. Its chief features are chat and search, which let users get answers to customer support inquiries; summarize meeting transcripts, write marketing copy, and access information from both internal resources and the web. Frosst added that all responses include citations and 'reasoning' chains of thought so employees can audit and verify the output. The chat and search functions are powered by existing Cohere technology, like Command (its family of generative AI models), and Compass (its multimodal search tech stack). Frosst said North is powered by a variant of its Command model that is trained for enterprise reasoning. 'It goes beyond just Q&A and gets into doing work for you. So, [North] has a bunch of asset creation. It can make tables, it can make documents, it can make slideshows. It can do a bunch of market research,' Frosst said. It's worth noting that in May, Cohere acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating high-level market research. Like other AI agent platforms, North can connect to existing workplace tools like Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Outlook and Linear, and integrate with any Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to access industry-specific or in-house applications. 'As you build confidence by chatting to the model, there's like a smooth transition that happens between using this as an augmentation to using it as an automation,' Frosst said. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
TechCrunch
06-08-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Cohere's new AI agent platform, North, promises to keep enterprise data secure
AI agent tools promise to siphon out some of the drudgery from daily workflows, but most organizations are hesitant to adopt them yet, harboring a pressing concern: data security. Large enterprises with trade secrets, companies in highly regulated industries, and government agencies have thought more than twice about bringing in AI tools out of concern that their — or worse, their customers' — data could inadvertently be compromised, or used to train foundation models. Canadian AI firm Cohere is taking aim at alleviating those concerns with its new AI agent platform dubbed North, which promises to enable private deployment so that enterprises and governments can keep their and customers' data safe behind their own firewalls. 'LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to,' Nick Frosst, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, said during a demo of North. 'If we want LLMs to be as useful as possible, they have to access that useful data, and that means they need to be deployed in [the customer's] environment.' Instead of using enterprise cloud platforms like Azure or AWS, Cohere says it can install North on an organization's private infrastructure so that it never sees or interacts with a customer's data. North can run on an organization's on-premise infrastructure, hybrid clouds, VPCs, or air-gapped environments, Frosst said. 'We can deploy literally on a GPU in a closet that they might have somewhere,' he explained, adding that North was designed to run on as few as two GPUs. Cohere claims North also includes security protocols like granular access control, agent autonomy policies, continuous red-teaming, and third-party security tests. And, it meets international compliance standards like GDPR, SOC-2, and ISO 27001. More than private deployments Image Credits:Cohere Cohere, which has so far raised $970 million, most recently at a $5.5 billion valuation, said it has already piloted North with some customers such as RBC, Dell, LG, Ensemble Health Partners, and, as TechCrunch reported last year, Palantir. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise on August 7. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW North mirrors many AI agent platforms right out of the box. Its chief features are chat and search, which let users get answers to customer support inquiries; summarize meeting transcripts, write marketing copy, and access information from both internal resources and the web. Frosst added that all responses include citations and 'reasoning' chains of thought so employees can audit and verify the output. The chat and search functions are powered by existing Cohere technology, like Command (its family of generative AI models), and Compass (its multimodal search tech stack). Frosst said North is powered by a variant of its Command model that is trained for enterprise reasoning. 'It goes beyond just Q&A and gets into doing work for you. So, [North] has a bunch of asset creation. It can make tables, it can make documents, it can make slideshows. It can do a bunch of market research,' Frosst said. It's worth noting that in May, Cohere acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating high-level market research. Like other AI agent platforms, North can connect to existing workplace tools like Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Outlook and Linear, and integrate with any Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to access industry-specific or in-house applications. 'As you build confidence by chatting to the model, there's like a smooth transition that happens between using this as an augmentation to using it as an automation,' Frosst said.
Yahoo
06-08-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Cohere's agentic AI platform North gets wide release, aims to handle 'boring' work
Cohere is making its agentic artificial intelligence platform more widely available. The Toronto-based tech firm announced Wednesday that its North platform, which was launched in a limited fashion in January, is getting a broader release. The platform is already in use at Bell, Royal Bank of Canada and Dell. North can help companies summarize meetings, punch up marketing copy, answer customer support inquiries, draft financial reports and more. "It is a tool for augmenting and automating all of the work you do behind a computer that you would rather not do," said Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst. Agentic AI systems like North have been heralded as the next frontier for AI innovation and positioned as a booster of workplace productivity because they're essentially advanced software programs designed to independently reason, access information from various sources and execute intricate tasks. Frosst uses North on a daily basis for "the boring work, the monotonous work, the bureaucratic work." With North doing those tasks, Frosst said anything "distinctly human" is left for him. North came in handy recently when he was at an esports tournament and learned he was about to meet the CEO of a company Cohere had worked with four years ago. Usually, he'd have time to research the relationship between the businesses or ask staff to compile some notes, but with only a few minutes notice, he said he turned to North to put together a list of bullet points summarizing the companies' history. Frosst said it can just as easily be used to complete tasks such as crafting descriptions for job postings. North is able to do these tasks because users give the large language models (LLMs), which underpin the platform, access to their existing data and workspaces including Gmail, Slack, Salesforce and Outlook. "LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to," Frosst explained. While companies often eschew AI systems because they need to limit who can access proprietary data, Frosst said North is different. "We can pull from wherever your data is but keep it in your environment so that we do not see it and that's pretty differentiated," he said. The system can be set up within a company's environment and lets firms granularly dictate access, so users can be selective about what platforms North can reach and Cohere can ensure other users can't get ahold of someone's data once it's being used by North. The tool is also designed so it will only take actions that are authorized and will always seek human oversight for critical decisions or actions. While people may worry agentic AI systems will render a lot of jobs or tasks unnecessary, Frosst stresses North is designed to take the sting out of laborious tasks and give humans more time for creative, interesting work. For the vast majority of users, he said North can only augment and automate "a relatively small percentage" of the work done behind a computer. "There are not many jobs that this automates entirely," he said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 6, 2025. Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Winnipeg Free Press
06-08-2025
- Business
- Winnipeg Free Press
Cohere's agentic AI platform North gets wide release, aims to handle ‘boring' work
Cohere is making its agentic artificial intelligence platform more widely available. The Toronto-based tech firm announced Wednesday that its North platform, which was launched in a limited fashion in January, is getting a broader release. The platform is already in use at Bell, Royal Bank of Canada and Dell. North can help companies summarize meetings, punch up marketing copy, answer customer support inquiries, draft financial reports and more. 'It is a tool for augmenting and automating all of the work you do behind a computer that you would rather not do,' said Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst. Agentic AI systems like North have been heralded as the next frontier for AI innovation and positioned as a booster of workplace productivity because they're essentially advanced software programs designed to independently reason, access information from various sources and execute intricate tasks. Frosst uses North on a daily basis for 'the boring work, the monotonous work, the bureaucratic work.' With North doing those tasks, Frosst said anything 'distinctly human' is left for him. North came in handy recently when he was at an esports tournament and learned he was about to meet the CEO of a company Cohere had worked with four years ago. Usually, he'd have time to research the relationship between the businesses or ask staff to compile some notes, but with only a few minutes notice, he said he turned to North to put together a list of bullet points summarizing the companies' history. Frosst said it can just as easily be used to complete tasks such as crafting descriptions for job postings. North is able to do these tasks because users give the large language models (LLMs), which underpin the platform, access to their existing data and workspaces including Gmail, Slack, Salesforce and Outlook. 'LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to,' Frosst explained. While companies often eschew AI systems because they need to limit who can access proprietary data, Frosst said North is different. 'We can pull from wherever your data is but keep it in your environment so that we do not see it and that's pretty differentiated,' he said. The system can be set up within a company's environment and lets firms granularly dictate access, so users can be selective about what platforms North can reach and Cohere can ensure other users can't get ahold of someone's data once it's being used by North. Monday Mornings The latest local business news and a lookahead to the coming week. The tool is also designed so it will only take actions that are authorized and will always seek human oversight for critical decisions or actions. While people may worry agentic AI systems will render a lot of jobs or tasks unnecessary, Frosst stresses North is designed to take the sting out of laborious tasks and give humans more time for creative, interesting work. For the vast majority of users, he said North can only augment and automate 'a relatively small percentage' of the work done behind a computer. 'There are not many jobs that this automates entirely,' he said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 6, 2025.
