Cohere disclosed the first close of a Series E on Thursday, targeting up to CAD 7B and valuing the company at CAD 35.7B.
Schwarz Group, the German retail group that owns the Schwarz Digits IT division, came in as lead investor. The new money also drew Bell Ventures and Bullhound Capital, and Ottawa took an equity stake. Inovia Capital, Nvidia and Prosperity7 Ventures returned.
Chief executive Aidan Gomez called the size a record for Canada and said the federal government’s participation underscored the country’s role in AI development. Chief financial officer Francois Chadwick said the money goes toward compute, research and the enterprise deployments Cohere sells into regulated industries and governments. He also cited 165 percent year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue for the period ending Q3 2026, and a customer base that grew 20 times over a year to 300 accounts, including names such as Fujitsu, RBC, PwC and TD Bank.
That customer list explains the shape of the round. Cohere positions its models as sovereign AI, deployed on customer infrastructure rather than behind a vendor’s API, which is the sales pitch for banks, health systems and ministries that cannot send sensitive records offshore.
A government check in a private round is unusual, and it places Cohere inside Ottawa’s effort to keep AI capability inside the country. Schwarz Digits separately committed billions to new data center capacity in Germany.
Cohere is not chasing frontier benchmarks in this raise. It is selling the boring version of AI, which suits buyers who care more about where the tokens live than how they score.
