The final merger agreement between the Canadian Cohere and the German Aleph Alpha is now signed.
Subject to the “final regulatory authorizations,” the first will acquire the second. The operation, backed by both countries, had been announced at the end of April. Cohere’s shareholders would own roughly 90% of the new entity, which would be valued at around $20 billion.
The signing of the definitive agreement appears to coincide with the closing of a financing round. Cohere is expected to raise up to $3 billion. The German government could come into play. The same goes for its Canadian counterpart, which has recently established a $500 million fund dedicated to investing, notably in AI-focused companies.
Ilhan Scheer, the current co-CEO of Aleph Alpha, will become Chief Operating Officer of Cohere. Samuel Weinbach, who co-leads the research at the German company, will oversee that function within the Canadian firm.
Another acquisition on the Germany-Canada axis
Since the initial announcement, Cohere has formalized another acquisition. It has taken over Reliant AI. Based in Montreal and Berlin, this startup uses AI to support the commercial management of pharmaceutical companies. It has two German founders (one of whom sold his first startup to Google before working at DeepMind) and a Canadian founder (also formerly at DeepMind, then Google Brain).
In the wake of this acquisition, Cohere signed memorandums of understanding with two Spanish companies. Specifically, Indra Group and Multiverse Computing. Underlying this is the Ottawa-Madrid cooperation framework and the bilateral technology agreements promoted in this context.
The partnership with Indra is intended to yield solutions tailored to Spain’s official languages (Basque, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Valencian). The alliance with Multiverse Computing is mainly concerned with commercial cooperation.
Cohere has also found anchors within the Canadian academic landscape. With the Mila institute, it has launched a collaboration focused on multilingual and multicultural assessment, starting with Quebec French. It has also formed a partnership with the University of Toronto to deploy its technologies there. And with the University of Waterloo, to establish—outside of formal curriculum—a certification in “AI Transformation and Change Management.”
Like Aleph Alpha, Cohere signed in July the EU code of best practices on the transparency of AI-generated content.
