AI 2026: Cohere is Canada’s Artificial Intelligence Champion
Founded by young pioneering AI researchers, the company today pursues enterprise software revenue rather than frontier capabilities.
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Cohere is a Canadian artificial intelligence company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang. Gomez was one of eight co-authors of the seminal 2017 paper by Google researchers introducing the transformer architecture that underpins large language models (LLMs) today, and both Gomez and Frosst come from the tradition of knowledge in AI and computer science centered around Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, which also produced OpenAI cofounder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Cohere has also tried to attract research talent by establishing its research arm, Cohere Labs, as an independent non-profit with the freedom to collaborate across academia and industry to publish its research. This move came as the major U.S. labs increasingly became closed off and stopped publishing any meaningful academic research.