Canadian artificial-intelligence startup Cohere has hired Joelle Pineau, the former vice president of AI research at Meta Platforms and head of its Fundamental AI Research lab, as its first chief AI officer. Pineau will guide strategy across the company’s research, product and policy teams, marking the most senior external appointment since Cohere was founded in 2019. The move comes as Cohere seeks to raise as much as $500 million at a roughly $6.3 billion valuation, bolstering resources as it competes with larger rivals including OpenAI and Anthropic. Unlike peers chasing artificial general intelligence, Cohere pitches its language models and its new private AI-agent platform, North, to enterprises and government agencies that demand stricter data-security controls. Pineau, a McGill University professor who helped develop Meta’s open-source Llama models, left the social-media giant in May after nearly eight years. One of her early tasks will be replacing Cohere’s departing vice president of AI research, Sara Hooker, while attracting additional talent to accelerate product pipelines within tighter budgets than those of Big Tech competitors.