Cohere's Aidan Gomez: The Canadian Founder Taking AI Models To The World, Not Just Big Tech

**Aidan Gomez** (0:00)
There's been a sort of slowdown in growth for these developed democratic economies. When that starts to taper off, you see the emergence of things like xenophobia, like that immigrant is taking my opportunity, they're taking my slice of the pie. A lot of people talk about like AI destroying the world. I really don't think AI is gonna destroy the world. It might be like our best shot at saving the world.

**Alex Konrad** (0:27)
Welcome to The Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup leaders about their upstart moment. Upstarts are challengers who punch above their weight and take on the status quo to improve the world, all while building a big business too.
I'm your host, Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere. Thanks for joining Aidan.

**Aidan Gomez** (0:50)
Thank you for having me.

**Alex Konrad** (0:51)
This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, banking redesigned from the ground up.
Aidan, you have run Cohere now for six and a half years. You guys have raised $1.7 billion. You work with some big governments, some big companies. When you think about sort of what Cohere looks like today, is it early innings? Is it everything you hoped for six years ago?

**Aidan Gomez** (1:11)
I think we're in the takeoff phase. So we've been around for a while, but this past year was really the breakout year for us in terms of enterprises just adopting AI at scale across the entire company. And the importance of all the things that Cohere is good at, really sort of hitting the front of mind of executives at companies all over the world. So privacy, sovereignty, and this focus on critical industries. And so last year, all of that came together, and we sort of started our takeoff. And then this year, we expected to get even bigger as enterprises, and the broader global economy really truly adopts AI at scale.

**Alex Konrad** (1:55)
So with some of these big companies or G7 countries that are working with Cohere, what is the problem that they want you to solve? Or where is your technology actually helping them in sort of a simple overview?

**Aidan Gomez** (2:08)
Yeah. Well, it's super broad because we're working with a really diverse range of customers from different industries, from like manufacturing to public sector to financial services, energy, and it's as simple as like get the model to every morning at 6 AM, check my unread emails, and send me a text with a summary of the most important ones that I need to know.
So that's like a super general, any company would want that. To a hyper-specific, within a specific ship, I'm going to plug north into the telemetry within that ship, do continuous monitoring on different sensors on board, and build automations around if sensors cross certain thresholds, what to do, who to notify, what sort of remediations to take.

**Alex Konrad** (2:57)
I know it's a wide range of use cases, but generally speaking, why often do they need Cohere to exist? Like why is that an unsolved problem for them?

**Aidan Gomez** (3:05)
Yeah, I think it's the privacy piece. I think the secure deployment of this tech, of this platform, is something that our customers couldn't do without. It's something that is a hard requirement in their settings. They can't send data out into a cloud. They're highly regulated. They're in these high security settings. And so they need something that's deployed on prem or even air gapped on their infrastructure. There's a deployment level differentiation in the other pieces within the product itself.
It's super easy to use. It's very customizable. There's tons of administrative enterprise controls that are unique to the North platform.

**Alex Konrad** (3:45)
So should we think of Cohere as the base layer, this infrastructure layer that then the company is either building internal apps on top of or it's running these agents, doing all sorts of other work with the info that your horsepower is providing? Or what would be the best way to visualize this?

**Aidan Gomez** (4:01)
Yeah, I think it's infrastructure for these high security enterprises to adopt agents and integrate it into their secure systems. That's what we do. At Cohere, obviously, we're internal customers of our own product. And many of the best automations have been created by or discovered by folks who don't code.
And they just, as part of their day-to-day work, they're like, I could totally use North for this. They build an automation and they share it with people. And so that's what we want to be able to enable is people just discover killer applications of the system. And then it goes viral within an organization and spreads out to all these different teams. And North really enables that.