Cohere Raises Up to C$7B as Canada Takes a C$1.6B Stake

The Canadian government is becoming a shareholder in Cohere. Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in Montréal on 29 October that Ottawa will make an equity investment of up to C$1.6 billion in the Toronto-founded AI company, which builds models and agent software for businesses and governments that want to keep sensitive data under their own control. The Prime Minister’s Office calls it a commercial investment, made alongside private investors including NVIDIA, Bell and Germany’s Schwarz Group, and paid in stages, with regular reporting on whether Cohere is meeting the conditions attached to it.

Those conditions are the heart of the deal. Cohere has agreed to create at least 1,000 new high-paying technical jobs in Canada by 2030, to spend at least C$1.7 billion on additional computing infrastructure in the country by the same year, to keep its Canadian incorporation and headquarters, to fund research partnerships and roles for students and recent graduates, and to keep working with the Canadian AI Safety Institute. Neither the government nor Cohere has said what share of the company the money buys or at what price. In a post a day later, Cohere framed it as part of a wider plan: more than C$4 billion of research and infrastructure spending in Canada between 2024 and 2031, more than 1,500 new jobs and over 250 paid student roles by 2029, building on a C$309 million GPU deal with Bell AI Fabric.

The government cheque sits inside a much bigger round. Cohere announced the initial close of a Series E targeting up to C$7 billion at a C$35.7 billion valuation, which it calls the largest private financing ever raised by a Canadian technology company. The companies of Schwarz Group, the owner of Lidl and Kaufland, lead it; Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital and the Government of Canada are new investors, and Inovia Capital, NVIDIA and Prosperity7 Ventures are returning. Cohere has not said how much of the C$7 billion is committed so far or when the round will close, CBC reported. It did give growth figures: annual recurring revenue up 165% year on year at the end of the third quarter, and a customer base that grew twentyfold in a year to 300, including RBC, TD Bank, Fujitsu, PwC and Bell Canada.

The European half of the deal explains the lead investor. Cohere merged with Germany’s Aleph Alpha earlier in 2026, and Schwarz Digits chief executive Christian Müller said the group intends to run Cohere’s models on its own STACKIT cloud. Germany’s digital minister, Karsten Wildberger, welcomed the round in Cohere’s release. Carney timed the announcement to the Canada–EU Summit he was hosting in Montréal and folded it into a pitch for “strategic autonomy” shared with Europe. Cohere says the money will go to its model and product roadmap, to AI built for regulated industries, and to the long-term compute needed to train what chief financial officer Francois Chadwick called “frontier-level enterprise models”.

For Ottawa it is a step beyond grants. In 2024 the government pledged up to C$240 million toward Cohere’s compute capacity from its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy; this time it is buying equity, and the commitments it extracted line up with the national AI strategy it launched in June. Carney’s own speech set the expectation, saying that “Cohere isn’t trying to create the largest AI model in the world” and instead builds efficient models that run on an organisation’s own systems. Whether that is enough is the open question. Cohere is raising C$7 billion while the American labs it competes with spend tens of billions a year on compute, and Canada is now exposed to the answer as an owner as well as a regulator.