OpenAI rival Cohere Inc. has secured $450 million in fresh funding at a $5 billion valuation, Reuters reported today.

It’s believed the round included the participation of multiple existing investors in the startup including Nvidia Corp. and Salesforce Ventures. It’s unclear if other returning backers contributed as well. Alongside Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, Cohere’s investor roster includes Oracle Corp., publicly traded cybersecurity provider SentinelOne Inc. and several venture capital funds.

The AI large language model developer’s latest raise reportedly also drew contributions from several new backers. The group is said to include Cisco Systems Inc. and PSP Investments, a Canadian pension fund. 

The number of participants in the raise could potentially increase in the coming months. According to Reuters, the $450 million that Cohere has raised so far represents only the first tranche of the investment. The company is reportedly seeking to raise more capital at the same $5 billion valuation.

Toronto-based Cohere offers a collection of enterprise-focused LLMs headlined by a model called Cohere R+. Introduced in April, it can process prompts containing up to 128,000 tokens, units of data that each contain a few letters or numbers. That allows the LLM to analyze lengthy business documents and code files.

According to Cohere, Command R+ understands 10 languages well out of the box and can augment its knowledge by drawing on information in external sources such as databases. It’s also capable of integrating with other types of third-party systems. Cohere says that the LLM can carry out multistep business tasks spanning several different applications and, when necessary, automatically respond to technical issues such as software bugs.

Companies can access Command R+ through a paid application programming interface and in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. When the model debuted earlier this year, Cohere announced plans to make it available in additional cloud platforms down the road. The company sells its LLMs alongside a cloud service for turning files such as business documents into embeddings, mathematical structures that neural networks can process more easily than raw text. 

Cohere’s annualized recurring revenue is believed to have stood at $35 million at the end of March, up from $13 million last year. The fresh funding the company has reportedly raised could potentially help it accelerate its commercialization efforts. 

Some of the new capital may also go towards developing a successor to Command R+. Late last month, OpenAI disclosed that its engineers had recently begun training its next frontier model. The development initiative could potentially create a stronger incentive for Cohere and other rival AI providers to build new, more capable LLMs for customers. 

Image: Cohere