Cohere Secures $125 Million to Expand Natural Language Processing Platform
Cohere raises a $125 million Series B round to scale its natural language processing platform and grow its international presence. The company also hires former Apple director Bill MacCartney to lead its new Palo Alto engineering office.
Cohere raises $125 million USD in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global to accelerate the development of its natural language processing platform. Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, and Section 32 also participate in the round, bringing the company's total funding to over $170 million USD. The startup focuses on making advanced language generation and understanding technology highly accessible to businesses through an easy-to-use API.
To support its rapid expansion, Cohere hires Bill MacCartney as Vice President of Engineering and Machine Learning to lead a new Palo Alto office. MacCartney brings extensive experience from his previous role as Director of Proactive Intelligence at Apple, where he oversaw a large team of scientists and engineers. He currently serves as a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University and praises Cohere for solving major ease-of-use obstacles in the NLP industry.
The company experiences massive growth across its operations as it builds on a recent partnership with Google Cloud and a previous $40 million Series A raise. Cohere doubles its headcount and sees platform usage surge by over 800 percent in just eight months. The team continuously adds new features to the platform, including tools that allow users to fine-tune BERT models to their specific business needs.