Cohere moves to acquire cybersecurity startup Aisle

Explainer

Canadian artificial intelligence company Cohere Inc. has signed a letter of intent to acquire cybersecurity startup Aisle. The Toronto-based AI firm announced the deal on Thursday, saying it will bolster its security capabilities and expand its European presence. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, nor were the deal structure or expected closing date. Cohere said it will establish a new division called Cohere Cyber and make a substantial investment to expand Aisle's existing hub in Prague. "Aisle has been focused on defending the critical infrastructure of the open source ecosystem, and it’s done that better than many of the more well known efforts," Cohere chief executive officer Aidan Gomez wrote on LinkedIn. The startup, founded in 2024, uses AI systems to detect and help fix software vulnerabilities. Aisle said it has found more than 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities in over 100 code bases in the past year, a claim the company said has been independently verified by software developers.

What specific vulnerabilities has Aisle discovered?

Aisle's discoveries include all 12 vulnerabilities patched in the January security update for the cryptographic communications library OpenSSL. The company also identified 18 of the 24 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures fixed in the latest version of the data transfer tool curl. Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang said in an interview that companies engaged in cyberdefence have an advantage. "It’s actually easier to patch vulnerabilities than it is to discover them and chain them together to attack a target," Zhang said.

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The acquisition adds cybersecurity as a new pillar to the business entity Cohere is building. This follows Cohere's announced merger with German AI company Aleph Alpha, a deal reported to be valued at approximately $20 billion and still requiring regulatory approval. In May, Cohere announced the purchase of biopharma company Reliant AI, which has operations in Montreal and Berlin. Cohere is also in talks to raise upward of US$3-billion, including funds from the Canadian and German governments, which would value the company at US$20-billion.

Who will lead the new cybersecurity division?

Aisle co-founder Ondrej Vlcek will become senior vice-president of the newly established Cohere Cyber division. Fellow co-founder Jaya Baloo will assume the role of Cohere’s chief information security officer, while Stanislav Fort will become vice-president of AI security. The three co-founders have previously worked at Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Czech cybersecurity company Avast. Vlcek wrote on LinkedIn that Cohere and Aisle began talking earlier this year and realized that combining would be a "natural fit."

Cohere said it will combine Aisle’s autonomous security research with its own AI models. "The capabilities of a foundation model and the specialized system built around it can reinforce each other," the company said in a blog post. Cohere plans to integrate Aisle's research into its model development and training processes, using verifiable security challenges for model evaluation and improvement. The company aims to provide an environment where customers can deploy and operate AI more securely in private clouds, on-premises environments and fully air-gapped settings.

Why is Cohere focusing on Europe?

Cohere framed the proposed acquisition as a way to further develop sovereign AI and invest in Europe, deepening its presence across the region. The company said it aims to strengthen European AI at a time when the industry is dominated by American tech giants. "I’ve been hearing how Europe is behind in AI, and how Canada is behind in AI," Vlcek wrote. "We can either keep complaining about it, or do something about it." The companies are pitching the deal as a sign of deepening ties between Canada and Europe.

Aisle's engineering hub in Prague is expected to become a Cohere office upon the deal's completion, broadening the company's foothold in Europe. Cohere explained that the acquisition reflects its continued investment in the region, following its moves involving generative AI company Reliant AI and Aleph Alpha. The company stated that increasingly capable AI systems are transforming both cybersecurity and the threats organizations face, and that defensive capabilities must evolve at the same pace. Cohere's entry into the AI security space comes as major players like OpenAI and Anthropic compete fiercely. Anthropic announced its Mythos model earlier this year, which the company said was adept at finding software vulnerabilities. Businesses, governments and regulators have also become deeply concerned about instances of AI agents breaking free of testing sandboxes, with agents from OpenAI infiltrating systems of the Australian government and AI company Hugging Face.

With files from The Globe and Mail, BigGo Finance and Canadian Manufacturing