Observed Signal · Feb 17, 2026 · Product Launch · Source: techcrunch · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Cohere Unveils Tiny Aya: Multilingual Models for Everyone
Cohere’s research arm, Cohere Labs, unveiled the Tiny Aya family of open-weight multilingual models at the India AI Summit. The base Tiny Aya model has 3.35 billion parameters, supports more than 70 languages (including multiple South Asian languages), and is designed to run on everyday devices offline. Cohere released regional variants (TinyAya-Earth, -Fire, -Water) and a command-following TinyAya-Global. The models were trained on a single cluster of 64 Nvidia H100 GPUs and are available for download and local deployment via HuggingFace, Cohere Platform, Kaggle and Ollama. Cohere plans to publish accompanying training and evaluation datasets and a technical report. The company’s CEO Aidan Gomez previously said Cohere intends to go public; CNBC reported $240M ARR for 2025.
Release of an open-weight, on-device multilingual LLM family expands accessible foundation models and localization capabilities important to developers and platforms, but it is not a platform-level policy or major-platform technical release.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Cohere (via Cohere Labs) launched the Tiny Aya family of open-weight multilingual models at the India AI Summit.
- The Tiny Aya base model contains 3.35 billion parameters and supports over 70 languages, including Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi.
- Cohere released variants: TinyAya-Global (fine-tuned for following commands), TinyAya-Earth (African languages), TinyAya-Fire (South Asian languages), and TinyAya-Water (Asia Pacific, West Asia and Europe).
- The models were trained on a single cluster of 64 Nvidia H100 GPUs and are engineered for on-device/offline inference on everyday devices.
- Tiny Aya models and related training/evaluation datasets are being made available on HuggingFace and the Cohere Platform; developers can download them on HuggingFace, Kaggle and Ollama.
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Cohere Releases Aya 23 Multilingual Open-Weight Models
Cohere released the Aya 23 family: instruction-tuned, decoder-only open-weight models in 8B and 35B parameter sizes focused on 23 languages. Built on Cohere's Command series and fine-tuned on the Aya Collection dataset, Aya 23 aims to provide high-performance multilingual capabilities as an open baseline for researchers and developers. The weights are available on Hugging Face under a CC-BY-NC license (non-commercial). The 8B model targets accessibility on consumer-grade hardware, while the 35B model offers stronger performance and reportedly outperforms several popular open models on multilingual benchmarks. The release is positioned as an alternative to closed APIs and English-centric open models for global applications.
Introducing North Small Translate: A leading sovereign open-weight machine translation model
Cohere launches North Small Translate, a sovereign open-weight machine translation model built for speed and cost efficiency. The blog also features new posts on AI governance, megakernels for North Mini Code, and a partnership with the University of Waterloo.
Cohere Surpasses Revenue Goals, Eyes IPO Momentum
Cohere, an enterprise AI startup founded in Toronto in 2019, told investors it reached roughly $240 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, above a $200 million target, and recorded quarter-over-quarter growth above 50% through 2025, according to a February investor memo viewed by CNBC. The company — backed by investors including Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures and valued at about $7 billion — said its business is primarily software-driven, enabling customers to run models via managed cloud services or on their own hardware. Cohere reported gross margins around 70% in 2025 (up 25 basis points year over year) and described its model as capital-efficient. The memo said Cohere plans further European expansion and to build out its AI agent platform, North, while CEO Aidan Gomez has signaled hopes to pursue a public listing soon. Competitors OpenAI and Anthropic are also weighing IPO options.
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