Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Honoree
2026
Co-founder
Cohere
Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang are the co-founders of Cohere, the world’s leading sovereign AI company. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Toronto, Cohere builds cutting-edge foundation models and end-to-end AI products that help businesses and governments solve real-world challenges with leading security, data privacy and deployment flexibility.
Aidan, Cohere’s CEO, previously worked at Google Brain, where he co-authored "Attention Is All You Need", the landmark paper that introduced the Transformer architecture powering today’s modern AI systems.
Ivan focuses on development of Cohere’s flagship agentic AI platform, North, and oversees the company’s work with public sector partners; before Cohere, he founded for.ai, now Cohere Labs.
Nick was the first employee hired by Geoffrey Hinton at Google Brain’s Toronto lab, where his research focused on capsule networks, adversarial robustness and model interpretability. He is also the lead vocalist of the indie pop band Good Kid.
Please note: Company names and biographical information here may reflect the role and activity held at the time of receiving the award.
