on cohere's valuation
Published: Feb 01, 2026
When we were raising for Silmo in the valley, we got some snarky comments about Cohere: 'What happened to Cohere, at some point it was such a hot company, and now... nowhere to be seen. Completely eclipsed by OpenAI and Anthropic.'
At the time, I didn't have a good answer. But on contemplating the question, I realised something that I hadn't appreciated before: if you take the ratio of current valuation versus initial funding put into the company, Cohere performs better than the bigger labs.
These numbers aren't exact, but let's just say:
- OpenAI initial funding: ~1B. Current valuation: ~1T. Ratio: 1000x.
- Anthropic initial funding: ~500M. Current valuation: ~0.5T. Ratio: 1000x.
- Cohere initial funding: 2M. Current valuation: ~7B. Ratio: 3,500x!
- Mistral initial funding: 100M. Current valuation: ~10B. Ratio: 100x.
The others (gemini, llama, qwen, kimi, moonshot, deepseek) count less, since they are too new, or attached to hyperscalers that print money and have near-unlimited compute.
In short, Cohere did well, and is in some respects a bigger success than OpenAI!