Aidan Gomez grew up in Brighton, Ontario and studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Toronto. In 2017, aged 20, he interned at Google Brain and was one of eight authors of 'Attention Is All You Need'.
He left Google Brain and founded Cohere in 2019 with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang. He paused his Oxford DPhil to do it and was granted the degree in 2024.
Cohere sells language models to businesses and governments instead of building a consumer chatbot. It raised a $40 million Series A in September 2021 and $125 million in February 2022, then $270 million in June 2023 at a $2.2 billion valuation.
A $500 million round in July 2024 valued it at $5.5 billion, and funding reached about $1.6 billion by September 2025. In April 2026 Cohere agreed to combine with Germany's Aleph Alpha in a deal that values the pair near $20 billion.