Aidan Gomez
Co-founder and CEO, Cohere
Toronto, Google Brain and the Transformer
Aidan Gomez studied as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, where he was a student of Roger Grosse[1]. He interned at Google Brain with Łukasz Kaiser and Geoffrey Hinton, and later worked there as a student researcher with Jakob Uszkoreit and Jeff Dean[1].
Gomez is one of the eight authors of Attention Is All You Need, posted to arXiv in June 2017, alongside Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Łukasz Kaiser and Illia Polosukhin[2]. The paper proposed the Transformer, a network architecture based solely on attention mechanisms[2].
He was later a doctoral student at the University of Oxford under Yarin Gal and Yee Whye Teh[1]. Before Cohere he led a group of researchers at FOR.ai[1].
Founding and growing Cohere
Gomez co-founded Cohere in Toronto in 2019 with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, and he is its chief executive[3][4]. The company says it raised nearly $1 billion across its Series A to Series D rounds between 2021 and 2024[3]. In 2022 it launched Cohere Labs, an open science initiative that it says has more than 4,500 community members and over 100 published papers[3]. In 2025 it launched North, an AI platform for workplace productivity with agent and retrieval features[3]. Cohere lists offices in Toronto, New York, London, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Seoul and Berlin, and its executive team includes Joelle Pineau as chief AI officer[3].
In April 2025 the electric vehicle maker Rivian elected Gomez to its board of directors[4]. Rivian's chief executive RJ Scaringe said Gomez would help the company bring new technologies into its products, services and manufacturing[4].
On 24 April 2026 Cohere announced that it would combine with the German AI company Aleph Alpha[5]. The combined company keeps the Cohere name, with Gomez as CEO, a global headquarters in Toronto and a European headquarters in Germany[5]. BetaKit reported in September 2026 that the two companies had agreed terms on a business combination agreement that would take Cohere's headcount past 1,000 across Canada and Europe[6].
On 29 October 2026 Cohere announced an initial close of a planned Series E of up to $7 billion CAD, with the Government of Canada taking a $1.6 billion stake[7]. Cohere said the round would value it at nearly $36 billion after the investment[7]. Gomez said the financing would make Cohere the largest AI company outside the United States and keep it headquartered in Canada[7].
Views on sovereign AI
Gomez argues that countries should own and control the AI systems they rely on[8]. In a June 2026 interview with Fortune he said that renting AI from someone rather than owning it is a national security risk[8]. He told Fortune that domestically controlled infrastructure is the first step towards that kind of sovereignty[8]. Fortune reported that Cohere sells models that governments and companies can run entirely on their own infrastructure, including on systems disconnected from the internet[8].
At the ALL IN conference in Montréal in September 2026, Gomez said Cohere does not plan to build its own chips[6]. He said the company wanted to focus on becoming a sovereign AI provider instead[6].
Known for
- Co-authoring Attention Is All You Need
- Co-founding and leading Cohere
- Cohere's merger with Aleph Alpha
- Advocacy for sovereign AI
Sources
- Aidan Gomez's personal website — checked 6 Nov 2026
- arXiv: Attention Is All You Need, June 2017 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Cohere: About — checked 6 Nov 2026
- BetaKit: Rivian elects Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez to board of directors, April 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- BetaKit: Cohere to acquire Germany's Aleph Alpha in sovereign AI play, April 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- BetaKit: Aidan Gomez says Cohere won't get into the business of making chips, September 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- BetaKit: Feds to buy stake in Cohere via planned $7-billion Series E, October 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Fortune: Renting AI from foreign providers is a national security risk, warns Cohere CEO, June 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026