What Is Cohere? Cohere is a Toronto-based AI company founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez (one of the original authors of the “Attention Is All You Need” Transformer paper) and a team of ex-Google Brain researchers. Unlike OpenAI or Anthropic, Cohere built its platform from day one around a specific use case: enterprise retrieval and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) . That focus shows up in three places where Cohere genuinely leads the field — and where most developers don’t realize they can get it for free: Embed v3 — text embeddings that consistently rank near the top of the MTEB benchmark, in both English and 100+ other languages Rerank v3 — the most-deployed neural reranker in production RAG systems, available via a single API call Command R / R+ — chat models specifically trained for RAG, tool use, and grounded citations And the part most developers miss: a free Cohere trial key gives you access to all of these. No credit card, no time limit.…