Seoul, South Korea’s capital.<\/p>\n
ED JONES\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
AI startup Cohere, last valued at $5.5 billion, announced Tuesday plans to open an office in the South Korean capital of Seoul this year to serve as an Asia-Pacific hub.<\/p>\n
Cohere appointed Andrew Chang as vice president of Asia Pacific to lead the efforts in Seoul and oversee the company\u2019s regional expansion. Chang was formerly the area vice president and Korea country manager at Nasdaq-listed Confluent, a data infrastructure software maker whose investors include Benchmark and Sequoia Capital. He previously worked at Google, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung SDS and Oracle.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re focused on building a strong local team, supporting forward-thinking customers, and partnering with the government to deliver secure AI solutions that drive meaningful impact across the public and private sectors to fuel economic productivity,\u201d Aidan Gomez, cofounder and CEO of Cohere, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The startup is headquartered in Toronto and San Francisco, and also has offices in New York and London. Cohere has raised $970 million so far from the likes of Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco, early CoreWeave backer Magnetar Capital, South Korea\u2019s Mirae Asset and Japanese tech giant Fujitsu. Cohere\u2019s last venture funding round was a $500 million Series D in July 2024.<\/p>\n
Founded in 2019 by Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, Cohere was one of the earliest venture-backed developers of AI models. Gomez is one of the authors of the seminal 2017 research paper \u201cAttention Is All You Need\u201d that led to recent advances in generative AI technology.<\/p>\n
Cohere cofounders, from left: Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Cohere<\/p>\n
(Forbes is part of a group of publishers that has sued<\/a> Cohere for allegedly scraping copyrighted works from the internet and using them to train its suite of large language models. Cohere has denied<\/a> the claims.)<\/p>\n Cohere develops large language models and customizes them for businesses, especially those in regulated sectors that manage sensitive data such as finance, healthcare, manufacturing, energy and government. The startup helps companies seeking better data security use AI to automate repetitive tasks like risk assessment, insurance claim processing and quality control.<\/p>\n For example, the company helps LG CNS, the information technology services affiliate of South Korean billionaire Koo Kwang-mo<\/a>\u2019s LG Group, to develop custom AI models with state-of-the-art Korean language capabilities that can be integrated with Cohere\u2019s AI agent product, North. Cohere has a similar partnership in Japan with Fujitsu.<\/p>\n LG CNS said<\/a> Thursday it co-developed a 111 billion parameter LLM with Cohere. The model supports 23 languages, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew and Persian, and is designed to run on companies\u2019 own data centers.<\/p>\n \u201cCohere empowers Korean enterprises by providing secure, multilingual AI solutions tailored to their unique needs,\u201d Chang said in an email to Forbes. \u201cWe help businesses overcome the biggest hurdles to AI adoption: security, privacy, and making AI accessible to non-technical employees.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur partnership with LG CNS is a prime example,\u201d he added. \u201cWe\u2019re creating custom agentic AI solutions that excel at understanding Korean and finance-specific jargon. As the first South Korean enterprise to customize North to serve their customers, they\u2019re already seeing results. Together we secured a major public sector AI project with South Korea\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n Cohere\u2019s decision to open an office in South Korea comes as the country\u2019s new president, Lee Jae Myung, pledged during his campaign to invest up to 100 trillion won (about $72 billion) in AI infrastructure and development.<\/p>\n OpenAI, the world\u2019s most valuable AI startup, announced in May that it plans to open an office in South Korea, where it has the highest number of paying subscribers outside the U.S. for ChatGPT.<\/p>\n More from Forbes<\/p>\n ForbesKorean Internet Giant Kakao Teams With OpenAI To Jumpstart GrowthBy John Kang<\/a>ForbesUnder 30 Alums\u2019 AI Startup Aims To Help Hedge Funds Speed Up Stock ResearchBy John Kang<\/a>ForbesFormer Naver Research Scientist Launches AI Startup, Aims To Be The OpenAI Of KoreaBy John Kang<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seoul, South Korea’s capital. ED JONES\/AFP via Getty Images AI startup Cohere, last valued at $5.5 billion, announced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,184,181,507,10256,10257,10258,10259,10262,1283,10261,10260,1866,74],"class_list":["post-10325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-cohere","tag-cohere-korea","tag-cohere-seoul","tag-korea-ai","tag-lee-jae-myung","tag-openai","tag-samsung-hbm","tag-sk-hynix","tag-south-korea","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}