Toronto-based artificial intelligence company Cohere is opening its third Canadian office in Ottawa, placing it near the federal officials who are among its most prominent customers, BetaKit reported on Oct. 8.
The office will be in the Glebe, next to Lansdowne Park, according to BetaKit. Nearly 30 Cohere employees in the Ottawa region work in go-to-market, engineering, infrastructure and security roles and will use the space.
Cohere has more than 800 employees in total, BetaKit reported. It already has offices in Toronto and Montréal, as well as New York, London and San Francisco.
A Cohere spokesperson did not give a hiring target, BetaKit said, but said the company will draw on Ottawa’s talent pool as it grows. Public job postings include forward-deployed engineers who can be based in the capital.
Yasir Naqvi, the member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre, said in a statement that Ottawa is central to Canada’s AI ecosystem because it connects AI innovators with federal decision-makers and policy experts, according to BetaKit.
The move follows a run of public-sector and defence work. BetaKit reported that Cohere signed a memorandum of understanding with the federal government last year to explore the use of AI in public services, and that it holds a contract with the Communications Security Establishment. Cohere also bought the naming rights to Ottawa’s Capital Exhibition Centre, now called the Cohere Centre.
Defence is a growing part of that picture. In a December 2025 report, BetaKit said Cohere was partnering with Thales Canada, the local arm of the French defence company, to support Thales’s operations and maintenance contracts with the Department of National Defence. Thales Canada holds two Royal Canadian Navy contracts covering patrol ships, joint support ships, minor warships and auxiliary vessels.
Ivan Zhang, Cohere’s co-founder, said at the time that the partnership “marks a strategic leap in responsibly deploying AI for national defence.” BetaKit described it as one of the first deployments of Cohere’s tools with the Canadian Armed Forces. The financial terms were not disclosed.
BetaKit reported this week that Cohere has expanded that partnership to bring agentic AI to naval and maritime support for the Canadian Armed Forces. Canada News Media has not independently confirmed the details of the expansion.
The Ottawa office comes days after Cohere launched North 2, an updated version of its enterprise agent platform. For Canadian readers, the expansion is a sign that the company that federal officials have often described as a homegrown alternative to U.S. AI providers is building its team close to the buyers it hopes will rely on it.
The details of the Ottawa office rest on a single published report, and Cohere’s own announcement was not independently reviewed for this story. The situation is developing.
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Sources: BetaKit (Oct. 8, 2026; Dec. 8, 2025).
