Cohere Inc., an artificial intelligence startup, is setting up a second headquarters in San Francisco, kindling optimism that the fast-growing AI sector will help revive the city’s commercial real estate market.
(Bloomberg) — Cohere Inc., an artificial intelligence startup, is setting up a second headquarters in San Francisco, kindling optimism that the fast-growing AI sector will help revive the city’s commercial real estate market.
The Toronto-based startup is leasing new offices in Jackson Square, a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. The office space can seat about 50 employees and will bring the company closer to the doorstep of its rival OpenAI, which is also headquartered in the city.
Investors are pumping billions of dollars into AI startups amid a frenzy around the technology this year. A number of these startups are based or expanding in San Francisco, fueling talk of an AI boom in the city. AI startup Anthropic is looking to sign a lease on the entire former Slack Technologies Inc. headquarters at 500 Howard Street, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“We have been very deliberate hiring in top locations for AI talent,” said Josh Gartner, spokesman for Cohere, confirming the office lease. “With headquarters in Toronto and San Francisco, and a key research hub in London, we are building in centers of world-class talent.”
Cohere, founded in 2019, develops large language models – software that can generate new content after being trained on vast amounts of content online – to help companies build chatbots and other tools. The startup’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Aidan Gomez co-authored the groundbreaking research paper “Attention is all you need” as an intern at Alphabet Inc.’s Google. That paper helped galvanize the current advances in generative AI.
Cohere is currently working with banks to raise a fresh round of financing, Bloomberg News reported. Earlier this year, the startup raised $270 million from prominent investors, including Nvidia Corp. and Salesforce Inc., at a valuation of up to $2.2 billion. The startup has a headcount of about 250.
Like its counterparts, much of the capital will go toward the high costs of developing its AI models. AI startups typically run lean operations with fewer employees compared with traditional technology companies. That could limit the impact the booming AI sector has on boosting San Francisco’s flagging office real estate sector following hits from a shift to remote work during the pandemic.
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