Exclusive Interview: Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez On The Big AI Launch You Missed
Cohere spent 18 months building North, its new platform for AI agents. Its CEO argues the flagship product could revive enterprise adoption of AI tools.
The Upshot
Later today, OpenAI is expected to announce its new flagship model, GPT-5, via a livestream show. The company has teased the launch with punny social posts. CEO Sam Altman posted an image of the Death Star from “Star Wars”.
AI frontier labs apparently don’t respect the ‘dog days of summer’ trope. Earlier this week, OpenAI announced open-source models on the same day that Anthropic announced an update to its own reasoning model. Google DeepMind announced a model to create video game-like worlds. And a few of them faced off against each other in chess (if you got into the game during lockdown, we recommend the Hikaru Nakamura livestream).
Meanwhile, Cohere – a model lab focused on the enterprise – announced a major product yesterday, AI agent builder North, via a thread by co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez on X. Gomez’s co-founder showed a demo to TechCrunch. But the Cohere launch was decidedly lowkey. Unless you follow closely, you probably missed it.
That’s okay by Gomez. “We don’t do these blockbuster launch event type things,” he tells Upstarts when we hop on the phone for an impromptu chat a few hours after the launch, surprising his own team. “We just want to quietly do good work, build really good software, and focus on becoming an essential partner to our customers.”
Cohere’s style of foregoing “hype-based marketing” means a quick refresher is helpful: headquartered in Toronto and built out of the AI community there, Cohere’s models underpin AI work at a bunch of big businesses like Accenture, McKinsey, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP, as well as some other startups working in AI at scale like Notion.
Cohere hasn’t seen the growth of tools like Cursor or Lovable, which have claimed record paces to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue, but business has picked up in recent quarters; Cohere doubled ARR in the first half of this year to reach $100 million, according to a Reuters report. Cohere is now reportedly in discussions to raise $500 million or more at a valuation of at least $5.5 billion.
And while Gomez says Cohere is shipping new models soon – more on those later – North, its agentic platform, is its “premier end-to-end product” going forward. The company spent 18 months getting it to this point, including testing it over the past few months with partners including RBC in banking, Dell in tech, Ensemble Health Partners in healthcare and Bell in telecom.
But above all, Cohere and its CEO believe that North unlocks meaningful use of AI within enterprises that aren’t realistically sharing the most valuable information with OpenAI and the rest. That’s because North is set up fundamentally differently from most solutions out there.
“People are used to working with systems that are half blind, or have an arm tied behind their back,” Gomez says.
What he means – and why startups and businesses looking to adopt their AI should be paying more attention to Cohere’s release alongside the OpenAI marketing blitz – in our exclusive interview below.