Cohere, an AI startup last valued at $5.5 billion, announced plans to open a new office in Seoul within the year. The Seoul office will serve as the company’s Asia-Pacific hub.

Andrew Chang has been named Vice President of Asia Pacific. He previously held leadership roles at Confluent, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Samsung SDS, and Oracle.

“We’re focused on building a strong local team, supporting forward-thinking customers, and partnering with the government to deliver secure AI solutions that drive meaningful impact across the public and private sectors to fuel economic productivity,” said Aidan Gomez, Cohere’s CEO and cofounder.

Cohere’s clients in Asia include LG CNS in South Korea and Fujitsu in Japan.

Both companies are using Cohere’s technology to build AI systems suited for multilingual and regulated environments.

Custom AI for Regulated Sectors and Language-Specific Use Cases

Cohere develops large language models tailored to businesses handling sensitive data in sectors such as finance, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and government.

LG CNS partnered with Cohere to develop a 111 billion parameter model that supports 23 languages, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, and Persian. The model is designed to run on in-house data centers.

“Cohere empowers Korean enterprises by providing secure, multilingual AI solutions tailored to their unique needs,” Chang told Forbes.

“We help businesses overcome the biggest hurdles to AI adoption: security, privacy, and making AI accessible to non-technical employees.”

“Our partnership with LG CNS is a prime example,” Chang said.

“We’re creating custom agentic AI solutions that excel at understanding Korean and finance-specific jargon.”

“As the first South Korean enterprise to customize North to serve their customers, they’re already seeing results. Together we secured a major public sector AI project with South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs”.

Backed by Global Investors and Built by AI Pioneers

Cohere has raised $970 million from Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco, Magnetar Capital, Mirae Asset, and Fujitsu. The company was featured on the Forbes AI 50 list this year.

Founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang, Cohere has offices in Toronto, San Francisco, New York, and London.

Gomez co-authored the 2017 research paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which laid the groundwork for recent advances in generative AI.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/TECHCRUNCH

This article was created with AI assistance.