Cohere, a global artificial intelligence (AI) corporation based in Canada, will establish an Asia-Pacific (APAC) regional office in Seoul this year.
Cohere announced on the 15th that it will establish a new office in Korea within this year and appoint Jang Hwa-jin as the new head of APAC. Cohere stated, "The Korea office will act as a central hub driving business growth across the Asia-Pacific region."
Aidan Gomez, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Cohere, noted in a statement that, "We will focus on building a strong local team, supporting forward-looking customers, and collaborating with the government to provide secure AI solutions across the institutional sector."
Jang Hwa-jin, the new head of Cohere APAC, has worked at Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, and Samsung SDS, and most recently served as the country head of the data corporation Confluent, which is listed on Nasdaq.
Cohere, founded in 2019 by three researchers from Google Brain, has its headquarters in Toronto and San Francisco, with offices in New York and London. To date, it has received a total of $970 million in investments from companies including Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Salesforce, and Cisco. The current valuation of the corporation is estimated at approximately $5.5 billion (about 7.6 trillion won).
Cohere has strengths in providing its large language model (LLM) tailored to corporations. Among Korean corporations, it has formed a strategic partnership with LG CNS to jointly develop Korea-specific LLMs and customized agentic AI services. In May, it secured a project to build the "Intelligent AI Diplomacy and Security Data Platform" in cooperation with LG CNS and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
With the establishment of this office in Korea, Cohere is accelerating its global business expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. A company official stated, "We have already started hiring key talents in Korea and are running a research subsidy program to support AI researchers."