From RAGs to Transformative Riches: Attention Is All You Need

September 2025

Participate in financial markets long enough, and you will begin to develop an appreciation for the old saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

For those who lived through the markets at the turn of the millennium, there is something all too familiar about the current hype around artificial intelligence: a new technology that will undoubtedly change the world, but whose initial introduction is accompanied by massive spending, questionable fundamentals, outrageous prognostications and a few likely winners swimming along underneath a froth of impending failures.

An AI company seeking to differentiate itself from the frothy herd is Canada’s Cohere. What sets Cohere apart? A strict focus on enterprise AI. Instead of adapting cumbersome consumer models, Cohere helps businesses build less costly customized solutions using its Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology. Its transformer models are private, scalable and specialized, designed to improve both customer-facing services and internal productivity—without compromising data privacy. The approach is not necessarily to replace employees, but rather to empower and enhance what they do by streamlining mundane tasks.

It’s a remarkable journey for co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez, who went from co-authoring the groundbreaking paper Attention Is All You Need as a Google intern in 2017, to leading a company valued at US$6.8 billion in 2025. The paper—its title a riff on the Beatles song—outlined a new “Transformer” network architecture that was originally intended to improve results in the Google Translate app. After Google passed on the idea, Gomez and his Cohere co-founders Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang envisioned a very different use for the technology.

But for Gomez, Cohere’s current success is just the beginning of the journey, as he believes AI is nearing an inflection point.

In a market environment where there is a lot of froth around AI technology, Cohere’s approach is refreshingly grounded. Gomez has said the team deliberately sought investors who were focused on a return on investment—not hype.

“What Cohere is doing is trying to build a real business, a real independent, new company for the world. There’s [sic] no shortcuts,” Gomez told CNBC in 2024. “You need to convince investors who are deploying capital for a return in some number of years to give you that capital. That’s the way healthy businesses are built.”

For investors, staying ahead in generative AI means more than just watching trends; it means weaving innovation into the fabric of decision-making and sharpening their grasp of AI tech’s impact and risks. Cohere offers more than just financial upside for its investors—it’s a front-row seat to the evolution of enterprise AI. Participating in multiple rounds allows investors to learn directly from their portfolio company’s experience as AI reshapes industries in real time.

Attention may be all you need—but adaptation is how you thrive.