Cohere

Cohere is the enterprise LLM company purpose-built for regulated and data-sensitive organizations — its models are deployable entirely on-premises or in a private cloud, addressing the data sovereignty concerns that prevent financial institutions, healthcare systems, and governments from adopting public cloud AI APIs. The company raised $500M at a $5.5B valuation in 2024, backed by Oracle, NVIDIA, and Salesforce, and its Command R+ model leads benchmarks for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) across multilingual enterprise knowledge bases. Co-founders Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst all co-authored the original 'Attention Is All You Need' transformer paper that launched the LLM revolution — arguably the most pedigreed founding team in enterprise AI.