Toronto-Dominion Bank and Cohere, the Toronto-based artificial intelligence company, announced a strategic partnership worth up to $25 million over three years on Sept. 22, 2026, pairing the bank’s in-house AI lab with one of Canada’s most valuable homegrown AI firms.
The collaboration brings together TD’s Layer 6 research and development division and a team of Cohere specialists, who will work side by side at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, according to a joint statement from the companies. The goal, they said, is to explore practical applications of Cohere’s secure enterprise AI models inside TD’s operations, including knowledge management, productivity, decision-making and client experience.
“Canada has extraordinary AI talent, research and companies,” said Rizwan Khalfan, TD’s executive vice-president and vice-chair of strategic growth, innovation and partnerships, in the statement. “The opportunity now is to connect that strength and translate it into practical applications that create value for clients.”
François Chadwick, Cohere’s chief financial officer, said the company was “excited to collaborate with the bank’s Layer 6 team to explore practical applications of enterprise AI that can strengthen productivity.” Maks Volkovs, Layer 6’s co-founder and chief AI scientist, said world-class AI research creates the greatest impact “when it is driven by real-world challenges.”
TD also said it is donating $1 million to TechSpark’s AI Lit for Entrepreneurs accelerator, which supports underrepresented founders, as part of its broader AI push. The Cohere partnership follows TD’s previously announced pledge to direct up to $150 billion in financing toward AI infrastructure and other sectors the bank considers economically critical to Canada.
The deal caps a busy month for Cohere. Days earlier, on Sept. 16, Cohere and German AI developer Aleph Alpha agreed to closer commercial terms as the Toronto company works to secure more computing capacity for training larger models, according to The Logic. Cohere, founded in Toronto in 2019 by chief executive Aidan Gomez along with co-founders Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, raised its valuation to roughly $7 billion in a funding round last September that counted the Business Development Bank of Canada among its backers, and now employs more than 450 people.
For Canadian businesses, the TD-Cohere partnership signals that the country’s largest financial institutions are looking to homegrown AI vendors rather than relying solely on U.S. players such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to build out enterprise AI capability. Whether Canada can translate its AI research strength into commercial and economic advantage has been a central question in Ottawa’s national AI strategy, which commits $2.3 billion in federal spending but has drawn scrutiny for offering few details on implementation and privacy rules.
Neither company disclosed a timeline for when TD customers might see results from the collaboration, or how the $25-million commitment will be divided among research, staffing and technology costs.
