Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) company Cohere is establishing a legal entity in Korea and moving in earnest to target the Asia-Pacific market. Cohere will make Korea, where adoption of AI by corporations and individuals is active, its "AI hub," and plans to hire development and sales staff in Korea in the double digits.
Frank O'Dowd, Cohere chief revenue officer (CRO), said at a press briefing at the Westin Josun Hotel in Sogong-dong, Seoul, on the 5th, "The Asia-Pacific market, including Korea, is Cohere's core growth engine," adding, "We doubled the size of our APAC organization over the past 12 months and will double it again by the end of this year."
Cohere pointed to APAC as a growth engine because demand is rising for sovereign AI—under which corporations and governments directly control AI infrastructure—in major countries such as Korea, Japan, and Singapore. According to market research firm IDC, 80% of corporations in the APAC region said they would prioritize AI sovereignty, including data control and security, when introducing AI for core operations.
Cohere, co-founded in 2019 by three people including researchers from Google Brain, is an AI company that touts implementation of "sovereign AI," under which corporations and governments can choose and control all AI models, data, and infrastructure, as its differentiator. Cohere chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder Aidan Gomez is a co-author of the paper that first presented the "Transformer" architecture, the technology underlying Generative AI, "Attention Is All You Need."
O'Dowd, the CRO, said, "From its early days, Cohere targeted the enterprise AI market rather than consumer use, which set us apart from competitors," adding, "In particular, we have provided sovereign AI to corporations in heavily regulated industries such as finance, manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, as well as to public institutions."
For Cohere's enterprise AI agent platform North, the company cited as a competitive edge that it is not tied to a specific cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, and can also be used in on-premise (deployed) environments such as a corporation's own servers. O'Dowd, the CRO, said, "From Cohere models to cutting-edge frontier models and open-weight and open-source models, all can be used in North," adding, "The biggest differentiator of the Cohere AI platform is that it helps customers choose and operate the optimal model by considering both business purpose and expense."
Jang Hwa-jin, president and head of Asia-Pacific, also said, "Sovereign AI as Cohere defines it means customers can build the model they want on the infrastructure they want, and that AI models, data, and infrastructure are within the customer's control." Jang added, emphasizing safety, "For models built on-premise, even Cohere cannot see what data and agents customers are using."
Competition is fierce as major U.S. AI corporations such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, as well as Chinese AI corporations, are targeting the enterprise AI market. In response, Cohere and French flagship AI corporation Mistral are moving to win customers by presenting sovereign AI as a differentiator. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez recently argued in an op-ed in the U.S. business magazine Fortune that AI should be regarded as a national strategic asset like energy and critical minerals.
Gomez, the CEO, said, "Each country must decide whether to choose sovereign AI or accept digital dependence," adding, "It is risky for corporations and governments to rely on a small number of AI corporations." Citing the example of Anthropic unveiling its top-tier model "Mythos" in April this year and the U.S. government subsequently blocking foreign access on national security grounds, he stressed that major countries must secure control over AI models and data.
Cohere set up an APAC hub in Seoul last year and plans to establish separate legal entities in Korea and Japan in the second half of this year. In Singapore, it aims to strengthen cooperation in the public institutional sector. Boosted by expansion of its APAC business, the company expects Cohere's overall sales growth rate this year to exceed 100%. Jang said, "APAC customers increased fivefold over the past year, with many of them in Korea," adding, "We will expand our customer base by more than threefold by next year."
In Korea, Cohere worked with key partner LG CNS to jointly develop Jiphyeon, a Korean-specialized model, and in Japan, the Digital Agency is using Takane, a large language model (LLM) co-developed with Fujitsu.
Within the year, Cohere also plans to unveil Command A Plus, an ultra-large model with 1 trillion parameters.
For the Korean entity, establishment is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year, and the company said it will hire domestic staff in the double digits, including forward deployed engineers (FDEs) who support building custom AI in corporate field settings.