Cohere, the Canada and US-based startup that builds AI models for enterprises, is opening an office in France in a move set to ramp up competition for homegrown players like Mistral AI.
Although the North American startup already has a presence in London, it says the new office in Paris will act as its “central hub” for operations in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
“We’re choosing Paris and France to serve as our hub to expand across the EMEA region,” Cohere cofounder Aidan Gomez said at a press conference. “The core advantage is the market here, both for talent and business, and connectivity to the broader European and Middle Eastern ecosystems.”
The startup plans to double its current headcount in the French capital to 40 employees, which will include hiring a vice president of EMEA and a director of public policy.
New hires will be a mix of technical staff and commercial profiles, as well as “forward deployed engineers” in charge of bringing the company’s technology into enterprises, by embedding directly with customers to identify and develop use cases.
“We’re very excited about the growth [in Europe],” said Gomez. “The market is starting to invest in AI […] So we’re excited to be an option for European companies.”
Last year OpenAI also opened an office in Paris, while Anthropic has recently been reported to be hiring employees in France, although the company hasn’t opened an office yet.
Competing with Mistral
Cohere, which has raised nearly $1.5bn and is valued $6.8bn, develops foundational AI models that exclusively target enterprise customers. The startup deploys the technology on customers’ premises and trains its models using their internal data. This enables greater privacy and security, says the company, compared to off-the-shelf models offered by competitors like US tech giant OpenAI.
Cohere’s customers therefore include companies in regulated sectors like finance, healthcare and the public sector.
It’s a similar pitch to that of Paris-based darling Mistral AI, which develops open source foundational AI models with a strong focus on privacy and security, and largely targets enterprise customers.
Mistral, which just raised a €1.7bn Series C at an €11.7bn valuation just over two years since launching, is considered Europe’s best shot at competing in the global AI race.
The French startup has inked partnership with some of Europe’s largest enterprises, such as French shipping giant CMA CGM, as well as several European governments.
“There’s room for multiple players,” said Gomez. “We’d be very excited to support the French government or other governments inside the EU […] There’s a lot of work to get done, so I wouldn’t worry too much about competition with Mistral.”
Gomez added however that Cohere, which was founded in 2019, will differentiate itself from its French competitor because it is more established.
“We started on the enterprise journey first and have built a much stronger network of partners,” said Gomez, pointing to partners like Oracle, Dell and LG. “I believe our tech is the most mature and it’s in production.”
