Cohere Launches Command R7B to Disrupt Enterprise AI Market

Canadian AI startup, Cohere has launched Command R7B, the smallest model in its R series of large language models (LLMs), targeting businesses with a focus on speed, cost efficiency, and flexibility. 

The model is suitable for deployment on low-end GPUs, CPUs, and even MacBooks. It supports a context length of 128k and offers features such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with native inline citations, multilingual capabilities, and performance across math, code, and reasoning tasks. Cohere highlighted its suitability for enterprise use cases such as customer service and HR.

“Command R7B balances efficiency with performance, allowing businesses to deploy high-quality AI solutions on affordable infrastructure,”  Cohere said in its announcement.

The model has demonstrated strong results on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard and outperforms competitors in tasks related to RAG, tool use, and AI agents. Its performance has been evaluated against multiple benchmarks, including ChatRAGBench, StrategyQA, and the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard.

Command R7B is accessible via the Cohere Platform and HuggingFace, with the model’s weights released for use by the AI research community. Cohere is offering the model at $0.0375 per million input tokens.

Command 7B joins other small language models released this week, including Microsoft’s Phi-4 and Google’s PaliGemma 2.

Cohere recently launched Rerank 3.5 to enhance search relevance and content ranking for enterprises, offering multilingual support in over 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The company recently secured a $240 million investment from the Canadian government to build a multibillion-dollar AI data centre in Canada. 

Founded in 2019, Cohere specialises in developing LLMs for business applications. Unlike some of its counterparts, such as OpenAI and Google, Cohere focuses on enterprise solely rather than pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI). Earlier this year, Cohere reached a valuation of $5.5 billion raising  $500 million in their Series D funding round.