AI startup Cohere Inc, which is backed by Nvidia, has signed an agreement with Canada's telecom major BCE Inc to offer  full-stack sovereign AI solutions for government and enterprise customers across Canada, and to deploy proprietary, secure AI solutions within Bell.  

Bell is wholly-owned by BCE.

Cohere will make its secure enterprise-grade AI solutions available through Bell AI Fabric as part of the partnership, the companies said in a statement.

Bell AI Fabric is comprised of four layers. These include hardware infrastructure including Canada's largest sovereign AI data centres on the largest fibre network and software infrastructure including Cohere's Large Language Models (LLMs) customized for Bell. The layers also consist of advisory, tech and professional services led by Ateko, Bell's tech services brand; and an application layer of consumer and business AI applications including Cohere's North agentic AI platform.

All the four layers come armed with  cybersecurity protections, the statement said.

"Our partnership with Bell Canada will provide the Canadian government and enterprises with world-class options for sovereign, security-first AI. This has the potential to be truly transformative for organizations looking to massively increase their productivity and efficiency without any compromise on data security and privacy," said Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO, Cohere.

Cohere, which was founded by former Google researchers, including CEO Aidan Gomez, had raised $500 million in new funding from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu in July last year.

The AI startup was looking to raise another $500 million, according to a Financial Times report as competition grows from rivals such as  OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.