Cohere is an enterprise AI company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Unlike consumer-facing labs, Cohere has never shipped its own consumer chatbot; the business runs entirely on API access, subscriptions, and enterprise contracts for companies and governments building AI into their own products.
Its Chat API, built on the Command family of models, added Retrieval-Augmented Generation so responses can ground themselves in a company's own documents or live web search rather than relying purely on model memory, reducing hallucination and producing citations back to source material. Developers can use RAG end-to-end or call its Document, Query-generation, and Connector modes individually, alongside separate Embed and Rerank models for search and retrieval pipelines.
Cohere targets enterprises and developers building internal AI tools, customer-facing assistants, or search systems who need private deployment options and verifiable citations rather than an off-the-shelf chatbot. Pricing runs on pay-as-you-go API usage: free trial keys exist for evaluation but are rate-limited and barred from production use, while production keys are billed per token, from around $0.0375 per 1M input tokens on the smallest Command R7B model up to $2.50 per 1M input tokens on Command R+.
