Cohere is a company that trains its own AI models and sells them to businesses, mainly through an API (an interface that another program calls over the internet). Its model families are Command (large language models that generate text), Embed (models that turn text into vectors, lists of numbers that capture meaning, for semantic search), Rerank (models that reorder search results by relevance), Transcribe (speech recognition), Translate, Parse (document parsing) and Aya (multilingual models).
A developer calls endpoints such as /chat, /embed and /rerank and gets generated text, vectors or ranked results back. On top of the models, Cohere sells North, an enterprise platform for AI agents and assistants, and Compass, a search system over a company's own documents. Companies that need isolation can run models on Model Vault, a dedicated hosted inference service, or in private deployments on their own servers or isolated cloud networks.
A trial API key is free but rate-limited and not for commercial use. A production API key is billed per use, priced per million tokens; North, Compass and private deployments have custom enterprise pricing.