Cohere, a company founded in Toronto in 2019 that builds AI for businesses and governments, has taken a first step toward buying AISLE, a startup whose AI searches software for security flaws. The two companies said on Thursday that they have signed a letter of intent, an early agreement that lays out the plan before a final deal, so the purchase is not yet done. Neither company has said what Cohere will pay.
AISLE, founded in 2025, builds AI systems that find, confirm and help fix vulnerabilities, weaknesses in software that an attacker could use, that nobody had spotted before. AISLE says that in its first year it found more than 500 of these previously unknown flaws in more than 100 software projects. Each was given a public tracking number, and Cohere says the projects' own maintainers reviewed them. They include all 12 flaws fixed in the January security update of OpenSSL, a free toolkit for encrypting and securing communication between computers, and OpenSSL's own notice of Jan. 27 credits AISLE's researchers on each one. OpenSSL rated one of the 12 high severity and most of the rest low. AISLE also says it found 18 of the 24 flaws fixed in the latest release of curl, a tool for moving data across the internet.
AISLE's three founders will join Cohere. Chief executive Ondrej Vlcek will lead Cohere Cyber, a new unit that will sell security tools to Cohere's customers, as a senior vice president. Jaya Baloo will become Cohere's global chief information security officer, the executive in charge of its security. Stanislav Fort, AISLE's chief scientist and chief technology officer, will become Cohere's vice president of AI security and work with Ivan Zhang, Cohere's co-founder and chief technology officer, to bring security research into how Cohere builds and trains its models. AISLE says that once the deal is done, its Prague headquarters will become Cohere's Prague office.
Cohere sells what it calls sovereign AI: AI that a company or government keeps under its own control, along with its data. Cohere says customers want to run it on computer systems reserved for them, in their own buildings, or on machines cut off from outside networks. It says security has become one of the biggest factors in whether businesses put AI to work, and that as AI changes both how companies defend themselves and the attacks they face, defenses must improve just as fast. Cohere says the deal, which follows its purchase of Reliant AI and its tie-up with the AI company Aleph Alpha, would deepen its presence in Europe.
Cohere also says it wants to explore whether hard security problems, where an answer can be clearly checked as right or wrong, could help it test and improve its future AI models. Neither company has said when the deal will close. AISLE says it is focused on keeping things steady for its customers and partners and will share more as the deal moves forward.