Aug 14 (Reuters) -

Canadian AI startup Cohere was valued at $6.8 billion

following its latest $500 million funding round, as it seeks to

expand its market share in a highly competitive industry of

selling AI to enterprises.

The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Inovia

Capital, with participation from existing investors AMD

Ventures, Nvidia ( NVDA ), PSP Investments and Salesforce

Ventures, among others.

Unlike most AI companies such as OpenAI and Meta's

Llama, which are focused on broad foundational models, Cohere

builds enterprise-specific AI models.

"The funding allows us to expand more globally, branch off

into different modalities, as you saw us launch a command vision

model recently, and keep building secure AI for the enterprise,"

Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere, said in an interview.

Alongside the fundraise, Cohere appointed Joelle Pineau,

former vice president of AI Research at Meta, as chief

AI officer, and Francois Chadwick, former executive at Uber

and Shield AI, as chief financial officer.

Pineau, who was with Meta for eight years and had led Meta's

Fundamental AI Research group since 2023, left in May, at a time

when the tech giant is aggressively investing and building out a

new AI research team.

In January, Cohere launched North, a ChatGPT-style tool

designed to help knowledge workers with tasks such as document

summarization.

The company said it will use the new funding to advance

agentic AI that can help businesses and governments operate more

efficiently.

The fundraise comes amid a broader surge in AI financing, as

private equity and Big Tech channel capital into startups in

pursuit of strong returns from innovative AI products.