Acquisition is intended to accelerate entry into the healthcare sector.
Toronto-based AI scaleup Cohere has acquired yet another German-rooted company in Montréal- and Berlin-based Reliant AI. The acquisition is meant to help push Cohere’s flagship AI product into a new vertical: healthcare.
Cohere announced the acquisition of the biopharmaceutical data processing startup on Tuesday morning. It marks Cohere’s second acquisition deal in a month, following the April announcement of its planned takeover of German firm Aleph Alpha. In addition to strengthened European ties, Cohere said the deal significantly expands its footprint in the global healthcare and life sciences sectors. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Healthcare represents one of the most consequential opportunities for AI.”
“Healthcare represents one of the most consequential opportunities for AI and it demands secure, sovereign, and domain-specific systems,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in a statement. “Together, we will accelerate progress in healthcare, building on our shared footprint across Canada and Germany to serve these critical sectors.”
The acquisition brings Reliant AI’s research team, proprietary biomedical datasets, and “domain-optimized technology” into Cohere’s flagship enterprise AI platform, North. North for Pharma, the purpose-built version of the agentic AI system, will help with research, clinical development, and scientific analytics, according to Cohere.
Founded in 2019 by former Google researchers, Cohere is Canada’s horse in the foundation model race. It develops the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI applications. Unlike some of its big-name competitors, Cohere has bet on specialized deployment of smaller, custom LLMs for businesses, rather than chasing larger, “do-everything” frontier models.
Gomez said that North for Pharma will be a cornerstone of the company’s expanding portfolio of industry-specific AI products. As consolidation in the AI sector sees fewer non-US companies to choose from, the Toronto company has positioned itself as a sovereign AI solution that focuses on security, data privacy, and regulatory compliance.
Image courtesy Reliant AI.
“Joining Cohere represents a transformative opportunity to scale our biopharma AI solutions globally while maintaining the security and sovereignty that life sciences organizations require,” Reliant AI CEO Karl Moritz Hermann said in a statement.
As part of the agreement, Cohere will assume Reliant AI’s customer relationships, which include global pharmaceutical giants like GSK, Ipsen, and Kyowa Kirin, and its ongoing engagement with other major pharmaceutical companies.
Led by ex-Google DeepMind leaders, Reliant AI launched out of stealth with $13.5 million USD ($18.4 million CAD) in funding back in August 2024. Its first product, Reliant Tabular, was a data platform designed to help life science analysts find scientific evidence for their decisions through automated systematic reviews, asset scans, and analyses. Cohere said the platform dramatically accelerates decision-making and time to market for therapeutics.
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Reliant’s entire team of more than 30 employees, divided between Montréal and Berlin, will join Cohere as part of the deal. Moritz Hermann will become Cohere’s VP of AI Verticalizations, and chief scientific officer Marc Bellemare will become VP of modelling.
“Our combined expertise will accelerate drug discovery and research innovation for customers around the world,” Moritz Hermann said.
Feature image courtesy of World Economic Forum on Flickr. Shared under CC lisence BY-NC-SA 2.0.