Cohere announces plan to buy European AI cybersecurity startup Aisle

Cohere Inc. is acquiring European startup Aisle to bolster its cybersecurity capabilities as the artificial intelligence industry grapples with the technology’s potential to both defend against threats and conduct more sophisticated hacks if used by bad actors.

Toronto-based Cohere said on Thursday that it had signed a letter of intent to acquire Aisle, which is based in Prague. Financial terms were not disclosed. Aisle was founded in 2024 and has built AI systems that detect and help address vulnerabilities in software.

Aisle said it had found more than 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities in more than 100 code bases in the past year, and said its platform has matched or outperformed competing systems.

“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.

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In a blog post, Cohere said that it will combine Aisle’s autonomous security research with its AI models. “The capabilities of a foundation model and the specialized system built around it can reinforce each other,” the company said.

Cohere also said it will make a substantial investment in Prague to expand Aisle’s existing presence and establish the city as its global hub for AI cybersecurity systems.

Aisle is not Cohere’s first acquisition. In May, it announced the purchase of biopharma company Reliant AI, which has operations in Montreal and Berlin. Cohere also announced a deal to combine with German AI company Aleph Alpha this year, which still requires regulatory approval.

The Globe and Mail previously reported that Cohere is in talks to raise upwards of US$3-billion, including funds from the Canadian and German governments that would value the company at US$20-billion.

The cybersecurity risks of AI have been heightened ever since Anthropic announced its Mythos model earlier this year, which the company said was adept at finding software vulnerabilities. Anthropic initially limited access to a select group of companies to shore up their defences, and has since made it available to qualifying security professionals.

More recently, businesses, governments and regulators have become deeply concerned about instances of AI agents breaking free of testing sandboxes to access the internet. Agents from OpenAI, for example, have infiltrated the systems of the Australian government and AI company Hugging Face, while an Anthropic agent submitted a false homicide tip to the Philadelphia police.

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Aisle co-founder Ondrej Vlcek will become senior vice-president of Cohere Cyber, a newly established 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.

Mr. Vlcek wrote on LinkedIn that Cohere and Aisle began talking earlier this year and realized that combining would be a “natural fit.”

The companies are also pitching the deal as a sign of the deepening ties between Canada and Europe, when relations with the United States are frayed and the AI industry is dominated by American tech giants.

“I’ve been hearing how Europe is behind in AI, and how Canada is behind in AI,” Mr. Vlcek wrote. “We can either keep complaining about it, or do something about it.”