Cohere, the Toronto-based sovereign AI provider, has announced the initial close of a Series E round targeting up to C$7 billion at a C$35.7 billion valuation. It would be the largest private raise by a Canadian technology company. Schwarz Group leads the round. New investors include Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital, and the Government of Canada, while Inovia Capital, NVIDIA, and Prosperity7 Ventures are returning backers. Cohere will use the funds for its model and product roadmap, AI tools for regulated industries, and long-term compute infrastructure. The company ended the third quarter of 2026 with 165% year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth. Its customer base grew 20x to 300 customers over the past year.

Cohere proposes acquiring AISLE to enhance sovereign AI security for enterprises and governments.

Cohere has revamped its North agent platform to offer enterprises enhanced security and access controls for AI agents. The Canadian AI firm introduced North 2 on Monday, focusing on collaboration, token spend management, and platform security. North 2 features "skills" that document standard operating procedures for completing tasks, which can be shared across teams to improve consistency. The platform includes automations built through a drag-and-drop interface, libraries for shared knowledge assets, and memory functions to maintain context across sessions. Key security features include flow control for monitoring token usage by department and access control lists to restrict data access. Enterprises can deploy North 2 on-premises in air-gapped environments or in the cloud, using their preferred models. The launch comes amid increasing competition in enterprise agentic AI platforms from major cloud providers and companies like OpenAI and Meta.