AI company Cohere has acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based startup specialized in developing enterprise tools aimed at automating sophisticated market research tasks.
Sully Omarr, a co-founder of Ottogrid, confirmed the acquisition in a public statement made on social media, though he did not share specific details regarding the financial terms of the agreement.
According to the announcement, Ottogrid’s current product will be phased out. Omarr assured customers that they will receive sufficient notice along with a reasonable timeframe to transition away from the product. In expressing enthusiasm about the acquisition, Omarr emphasized the potential of integrating Ottogrid’s technology with Cohere’s existing platform. He described the move as a step toward greatly enhancing the abilities of users to automate workflows, enrich business data, and scale operations efficiently.
Ottogrid initially launched in 2023 as Cognosys, founded by Omarr and Homam Malkawi. After undergoing a significant rebranding effort in October 2024, the platform introduced substantial upgrades, adding new tools, integrations, and APIs. The company developed innovative technology allowing users to seamlessly extract information from webpages, perform detailed document analysis using AI, directly save extracted data into spreadsheets, or automatically expand and enrich sales leads lists.
Prior to its acquisition, Ottogrid raised $2 million from a variety of prominent investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Untapped Capital, Amjad Masad of Replit, Guillermo Rauch of Vercel, and Cohere’s own co-founders Ivan Zhang and Aidan Gomez.
Following its integration into Cohere, Ottogrid’s team will primarily contribute to “North,” Cohere’s newly launched AI-powered assistant platform tailored toward knowledge workers. North aims to simplify tasks like document summarization and other routine productivity functions.
This acquisition arrives midst a challenging period for Cohere. Recently, the company reportedly underperformed revenue expectations originally set in early 2023, missing its annual goal by around 85%. Nonetheless, Cohere told Reuters that their annualized revenue has now climbed to approximately $100 million, following a strategic reorientation toward offering tailored private AI deployments within sectors such as healthcare, government, and finance.
