Cohere buys Ottogrid to supercharge enterprise research

Cohere just bought a tiny market research startup, and the backstory is pretty neat: Cohere’s own founders were already investors.

Ottogrid co-founder Sully Omar announced the acquisition on X on Friday. The financial terms weren't disclosed, but Ottogrid confirmed it will sunset its standalone product after giving existing customers a reasonable transition period.

The real prize here is Ottogrid’s team and tech, which are being funneled straight into North, Cohere's newly minted enterprise workplace assistant.

From agentic scrapers to smart spreadsheets

Vancouver-based Ottogrid started life in 2023 as Cognosys, founded by Sully Omar and Homam Malkawi.

By October 2024, the team overhauled the platform and rebranded as Ottogrid. In plain English, they built a native spreadsheet interface packed with document intelligence.

Instead of copy-pasting between browser tabs and Excel, corporate researchers could tell Ottogrid to scrape complex websites, extract unstructured data into neat columns, or enrich long lists of sales leads automatically.

Prior to the sale, Ottogrid raised $2 million in seed funding. Backers included Google Ventures, Untapped Capital, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Cohere’s own co-founders, Ivan Zhang and Aidan Gomez.

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in a statement that bringing Ottogrid’s product directly into North will give enterprises a brand-new way to tackle research with smart tables.

Pivot pays off amid revenue pressure

The deal comes during an interesting chapter for Cohere.

According to a report from The Information, the startup missed its internal 2023 revenue projections by a massive 85%. Chasing OpenAI in generic chat was proving costly and uphill.

Yet just this week, Cohere told Reuters that its annualized revenue recently hit $100 million.

The turnaround came from an aggressive shift toward private, secure AI deployments tailored for regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and government.

With that enterprise backend in place, Cohere is now shopping for the user-facing tools to match.

Why it matters

Text-based chatbots are terrible at structured work. Ask any analyst: asking an LLM to research 40 companies produces a messy wall of text that still requires hours of manual spreadsheet formatting.

Ottogrid solves that interface bottleneck. If Cohere can cleanly integrate smart, automated tables into North, it gives enterprise knowledge workers a compelling reason to stay inside Cohere’s ecosystem instead of toggling between bespoke browser extensions.

For the broader industry, this acquisition highlights how foundation model companies are racing up the application stack. Pure API margins are under brutal pressure; owning the workflow interface where knowledge workers spend their 9-to-5 is where long-term enterprise retention lives.

We think this is an efficient acquihire. Cohere founders already knew the code and the founders from their angel investments. The main risk is execution: turning a nimble, beloved spreadsheet tool into enterprise-ready software inside North without losing its speed and simplicity.