He Grew Up Without High-Speed Internet
Then Co-Invented The Technology Behind Every Chatbot On Earth

Aidan Gomez's Childhood: Rural Ontario And A Teenage Web Business

Aidan Gomez was born and raised in rural Ontario, Canada, in an environment that shaped his relationship with technology in an unusual way: without reliable high-speed internet at home, he learned to squeeze maximum efficiency out of every piece of hardware and every connection he had.

That constraint bred resourcefulness rather than frustration. By age 15, Gomez had launched his own web development business, teaching himself to build and sell websites years before most of his peers had considered a first job. It was an early, hands-on introduction to both the technical and entrepreneurial instincts that would define his career.

Aidan Gomez Joins Google Brain: A Computer Science Student's Big Break

Gomez studied computer science at the University of Toronto, where he was recognized as a University College Alumni Scholar. While still a student, in 2017, he landed an internship at Google Brain — at around 19 or 20 years old, working alongside some of the most experienced machine learning researchers in the world.

It would turn out to be one of the most consequential internships in the history of the tech industry.

Aidan Gomez Co-Writes "Attention Is All You Need," Introducing The Transformer

During that 2017 internship, Gomez co-authored "Attention Is All You Need" alongside seven other Google researchers — the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, a fundamentally new way for neural networks to process language.

The Transformer went on to become the foundational architecture behind virtually every major AI language model built since — including OpenAI's GPT series, Google's own BERT, and, years later, Gomez's own company's models. He also co-authored a related paper that year, "One Model to Learn Them All," exploring how a single neural network could handle multiple different tasks.

Founding FOR.ai: Aidan Gomez's First Project With His Future Co-Founders

Still in 2017, while working at Google Brain, Gomez co-founded FOR.ai together with Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst — a collaborative program designed to help machine learning researchers around the world share knowledge and work together outside the walls of any single company. The project would later evolve into Cohere For AI, an open research lab.

Aidan Gomez Co-Founds Cohere In 2019 — Then Finishes His Oxford PhD Anyway

In 2018, Gomez began a PhD in computer science at the University of Oxford, having earned the prestigious Clarendon Scholarship. But in September 2019, he paused that academic path to co-found Cohere in Toronto alongside Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, both of whom also had roots at Google Brain.

Remarkably, Gomez didn't abandon the PhD altogether — he eventually returned to it and completed his doctorate in May 2024, finishing his degree while simultaneously running a company that, by then, was worth billions of dollars.

Why Cohere Deliberately Avoided Building A Consumer Chatbot Like ChatGPT

Cohere's founding mission was specific and, at the time, unusual: "to make large language models accessible to every business, not just tech giants." Rather than chasing consumer attention the way OpenAI's ChatGPT would soon do, Cohere positioned itself exclusively as a B2B platform — building models like Command for text generation, Embed for text embeddings, and Rerank for improving search relevance, all delivered through APIs rather than a public-facing chat app.

That enterprise-only focus extended to how Cohere's technology could be deployed: through public cloud, virtual private cloud, a customer's own cloud infrastructure, or fully on-premises — including air-gapped configurations for organizations in security-sensitive industries that can't risk models running on internet-connected servers.

Cohere's Valuation: From $500 Million To $7 Billion

Cohere's valuation climbed steadily and then rapidly across its funding history. The company was valued at roughly $500 million in December 2021, then $2 billion by mid-2023, following a $250 million round backed by Salesforce, Nvidia, Inovia Capital, and Index Ventures.

The July 2024 Series D — backed by Nvidia, Salesforce, and Cisco among others — came with a notable twist: around the same time, Cohere cut roughly 20 positions from its approximately 400-person workforce, even as it secured hundreds of millions in new funding. The company continued climbing afterward, reaching $6.8 billion in August 2025 following a $500 million round led by Radical Ventures and Inovia Capital, then $7 billion after a $100 million extension the following month. Total funding raised across all rounds now exceeds $1.6 billion.

Cohere's Revenue: $35 Million To $240 Million In Under Two Years

Cohere's revenue growth accelerated sharply through 2024 and 2025. Annualized revenue climbed from roughly $35 million in March 2024 to $62 million by the end of that year, then to $100 million by May 2025, $150 million by October 2025, and approximately $240 million by the end of 2025 — a 287% year-over-year increase that surpassed the company's own internal $200 million target.

That growth was underpinned by real, multi-year contracts with large enterprises including Oracle, Fujitsu, RBC, LG, Dell, and Notion — the kind of durable, recurring revenue that gave Cohere's growth curve more predictability than pure usage-based API competitors.

Cohere's North Platform, Canadian Government Ties, And Chip Partnerships

In August 2025, Cohere launched North into general availability — a security-first, agentic AI platform combining its Command models, Compass search technology, and customizable AI agents into a single enterprise workspace. The same month, Cohere signed a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government to help deploy AI across government operations, building on a December 2024 commitment of up to C$240 million from Canada for AI data center construction.

Cohere also deepened its ties with major chipmakers — Nvidia has been a long-standing investor, and in September 2025, AMD expanded its partnership with Cohere, certifying the Command model family to run on AMD's Instinct GPUs, positioning Cohere as a flagship partner in AMD's broader AI ecosystem strategy.

Aidan Gomez And Cohere: The Full Timeline, Year By Year

Five Business Lessons From Aidan Gomez And The Cohere Story

• Constraints can build resourcefulness that pays off later

  Growing up without reliable high-speed internet forced Gomez to learn efficiency early — a mindset that likely served him well building a lean, enterprise-focused company later on.

• Test your future co-founders on a real project first

  Gomez, Zhang, and Frosst had already been collaborating on FOR.ai for two years before formally founding Cohere — proof that a strong founding team often benefits from being battle-tested before the company even exists.

• You don't have to finish first to build something valuable

  Cohere entered a market already crowded with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — and still built a multi-billion dollar business by choosing a clearly differentiated lane instead of competing head-on.

• A narrower focus can be a genuine strategic advantage

  By deliberately avoiding the consumer chatbot wars and focusing entirely on enterprise customers, Cohere built durable, multi-year contract revenue rather than chasing the more volatile, marketing-heavy consumer market.

• Growth and difficult decisions can happen at the same time

  Cohere's 2024 layoffs occurring alongside a $500 million raise is a reminder that even fast-growing, well-funded companies sometimes need to make hard staffing decisions in pursuit of long-term efficiency.

Frequently Asked Questions About Aidan Gomez And Cohere