I was wrong when I suggested in my June update on Cohere that they probably had nothing that is both proprietary and valuable. While the LLM race is the main event, there are other types of models that are valuable to enterprise clients. It turns out that Cohere is among the leading providers of reranking and embedding models. Embedding models help find relevant material; reranking models help put the most relevant results first. Both can help an LLM answer questions using an enterprise’s own documents and databases. Enterprises have lots of data that needs querying, so that might be something. Cohere is also world-class at lobbying the government.
On October 29, Ottawa announced an equity investment of up to C$1.6 billion in Cohere, to be made in stages alongside private investors. To me, this has the shades of crony capitalism we associate with Trump (though cynics might say that’s nothing new in Canada). Consider that Invest in Canada Chair Dominic Barton (appointed in August 2026) is a partner at Radical Ventures, a key initial backer of Cohere. Barton and Carney travel in the same Davos globalist circles.