Cohere in talks to raise up to $3B at $20B valuation: Report
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu
Cohere is reportedly raising $2B to $3B at a $20B valuation. That would nearly triple its last price and set a record for a private Canadian startup.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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Cohere is in advanced talks to raise between $2 billion and $3 billion at a $20 billion valuation, according to the Globe and Mail, which cited four sources. If the deal closes on those terms, it would be a huge jump from the $7 billion valuation Cohere reached in September 2025. It would also set a new high mark for a private Canadian startup.
The timing is still fluid. Two of the sources said the round could close as soon as next week, but Aidan Gomez is due at three major corporate events that week, including Montreal’s All In AI expo, and any of those appearances could push things back. Cohere reportedly told investors about the fundraising target on a call last month, with non-government money expected to cover most of the round.
There’s already one big public anchor in place. Schwarz Group, the German retail company behind Lidl and Kaufland, agreed in April to commit $600 million as lead investor in Cohere’s Series E, the same round now being discussed at a $20 billion valuation. Ottawa is also in the mix. The federal government committed up to $240 million in December 2024 for a domestic AI data centre, and this year’s national AI strategy created a $500 million Canadian Tech Growth Fund that can take direct equity stakes in promising Canadian AI firms.
That fits Cohere’s whole pitch. The Toronto-based company sells almost entirely to enterprises and governments that want to run models on their own infrastructure, not through the consumer-facing playbook used by OpenAI or Anthropic. Its customers include Royal Bank of Canada, Fujitsu, Oracle and Notion, and it told investors in February that it ended 2025 with roughly $240 million in annual recurring revenue. In the same sovereign-AI race, Mistral just closed a €3 billion round at a €21 billion valuation led by Samsung.
The capital is doing two jobs at once: funding the company and making a point. Cohere’s investors aren’t just buying software; they’re buying a non-US fallback with government backing and enterprise contracts. That’s the trade now, and it says a lot about how nervous people are about dependence on American cloud giants.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what sovereign AI has become: a tidy excuse to pour public and quasi-public money into companies that still need massive private checks to look serious. Cohere isn’t being valued like a science project anymore; it’s being priced like infrastructure, which is exactly how the subsidy crowd likes to dress up industrial policy. Funny thing is, the US giants still sit in the hundreds of billions, so all this really buys is a smaller inferiority complex.
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