Canada Takes a Stake in Cohere as C$7 Billion Series E Opens, a Canadian Private-Funding Record

What happened

On Oct 29, Toronto AI lab Cohere announced in an official release the initial close of its Series E: the round targets up to C$7 billion (about $4.49 billion) at a valuation of about C$35.7 billion, led by companies of Germany's Schwarz Group, with the Government of Canada joining as a new investor taking an equity stake, the size and terms of which were not disclosed.

Schwarz Group pledged 500 million euros to lead the round in April, as part of Cohere's combination with German AI developer Aleph Alpha; Schwarz Digits chief executive Christian Müller said the group plans to run Cohere's models on its STACKIT cloud. Reuters reported the same day that Schwarz has spent 16 billion euros on new data centres in Germany.

Cohere chief executive Aidan Gomez called the government's investment a huge honour for the company and for Canada; Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the investment means all Canadians will share in the company's global success. Cohere said it made a number of commitments as part of the investment to support Canada's economic vision and grow the country's sovereign AI ecosystem, without publishing the details.

Key facts

Round size: targeting up to C$7 billion (about $4.49 billion) at a valuation of about C$35.7 billion (about C$36 billion on Reuters' figures); only an initial close has completed, and committed amounts and an expected closing date were not disclosed.

Investor mix: led by companies of Schwarz Group; new investors include Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital and the Government of Canada; returning investors include Inovia Capital, NVIDIA and Prosperity7 Ventures.

Use of funds: model development, products for regulated industries and computing infrastructure; Cohere said the funding will advance its modelling and product roadmap, develop fully verticalized AI solutions for regulated industries, and fund the long-term compute needed to train frontier-level enterprise models.

Business figures: annual recurring revenue grew 165% year over year in the third quarter of 2026, and the customer count grew 20-fold over the past year to 300, including Bell Canada, Fujitsu, RBC, TD Bank and PwC.

2026 expansion: Cohere completed three transactions this year — Aleph Alpha, Reliant AI and AISLE — and shipped North 2, an upgrade of its agentic platform North; new models and capabilities released in the same period include Command A+, Cohere Transcribe, Parse 5, Embed 5 and Rerank 5.

Record framing: Cohere called the round the largest private financing ever undertaken by a Canadian technology company; Reuters reported the Canadian government's equity stake alongside the Schwarz Group-led round.