Cohere CEO, Transformer co-author
Aidan Gomez
Profile
Aidan Gomez was twenty years old and interning at Google Brain when he co-authored Attention Is All You Need — the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer and quietly rewired the entire AI industry. Alongside Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin, he helped design the architecture that now underpins every major LLM. The paper credits him and Kaiser specifically for rebuilding the team’s training infrastructure — the kind of unglamorous systems work that makes research actually ship.
British-Canadian, raised in Brighton, Ontario. Computer science and math at the University of Toronto, then a PhD at Oxford finished in 2024. In 2019 he left Google to co-found Cohere with Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst. While OpenAI and Anthropic chased consumer chatbots and developer APIs, Gomez bet that the real money was in enterprise — banks, telcos, governments, healthcare systems. Deploy-in-your-VPC, your-data-never-leaves, sovereignty-friendly AI.
That bet is working. Cohere crossed roughly $240M in ARR in 2025, raised $500M at a $6.8B valuation, and brought in former Meta FAIR head Joelle Pineau as Chief AI Officer. Customers include Oracle, Dell, RBC, SAP, and Fujitsu. Their agentic platform North targets the exact workflows that consumer AI can’t touch for compliance reasons. Gomez has been explicit about turning down the hyperscaler valuation game — he told investors an IPO is coming “soon” and positions Cohere as the pure-play enterprise AI bet.
What’s worth paying attention to: Gomez is one of the few people in this space who is both a real researcher (his name is on the paper) and a real operator running a billion-dollar company. He’s skeptical of AGI hype, pragmatic about what LLMs can and can’t do today, and unusually clear-eyed about where the value actually lives — which for most companies is not chatbots, but retrieval, search, and agents glued to messy internal data. If you’re building for enterprise, Cohere’s models and Gomez’s public thinking are worth tracking.
Key Articles & Papers
Attention Is All You Need Introducing Command R+: A Scalable LLM Built for Business Aya: An Open Access Multilingual Instruction-Tuned LLM Introducing North: A Secure AI Workspace for EnterpriseControversies
No major public controversies. Cohere has drawn criticism from open-source advocates for keeping its larger model weights closed, and Gomez has publicly pushed back on the more apocalyptic AGI safety framings associated with Eliezer Yudkowsky and parts of the doomer community — a position that’s earned him critics on both the accelerationist and the AI-risk ends of the spectrum, but nothing resembling a scandal.
Spotify Podcasts
