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Augure vs Cohere: two Canadian answers to residency

Cohere is a Toronto-founded foundation-model company whose hosted API runs on Google Cloud in the US with on-prem and VPC options for enterprises; Augure is a Montreal company selling a finished per-seat product and an OpenAI-compatible API with Canadian storage, Canadian inference tiers and CAD prices.

Updated 2026-10-27 · Markdown version · Version française

Cohere and Augure are both Canadian, and that is where the resemblance ends. Cohere, founded in Toronto in 2019, sells foundation models (Command, Embed, Rerank) and an enterprise platform, North, to large enterprises and governments. Augure, in Montreal, sells a finished chat and document platform per seat and an OpenAI-compatible API, and runs the inference itself. The biggest difference is who operates the hardware your request lands on. Read this if you are choosing between buying AI infrastructure and buying an AI product. An earlier, longer treatment is at Cohere vs Augure: where each one actually runs your data.

At a glance

Augure Cohere
Company and jurisdiction Canadian company, no US parent or investors. Founded in Toronto in 2019; offices in Toronto, New York, London, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Seoul and Berlin. Investors include Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Salesforce and Cisco alongside Canadian funds. On September 16, 2026 Cohere and Aleph Alpha (Heidelberg, Germany) signed a definitive combination agreement, with dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin, pending regulatory approval.
Where customer data is stored Canada. SaaS platform: Google Cloud, US-Central, per its Trust Center; "We do not use servers outside of the US." Private deployments: inside your own VPC or on-prem.
Where inference runs Canadian infrastructure (Ontario) and vetted EU partners under zero-data-retention; never US providers. Hosted platform in the US; cloud marketplaces (Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure AI Foundry, OCI) in the region you pick there; VPC and on-prem on your own compute.
Your data used for training Never. Opt-out in the dashboard, applying to data created after the change, per its Enterprise Data Commitments (December 5, 2025).
Canadian residency option Storage always in Canada. Accounts can be set Canada-only: requests then stay in Canada or fail with 503 residency_unavailable, never served elsewhere. tofino-3 and the Augure Open models never leave Canada. On-prem or VPC in a Canadian cloud region, run by you. Canadian hosted capacity is under construction (see below).
Retention Prompts never logged by Augure; the gateway keeps no copy of a file after the request. Logged prompts and generations deleted after 30 days; zero data retention for approved enterprise customers.
API OpenAI-compatible, https://api.augureai.ca/v1 Native v2 Chat API with the cohere SDK, plus an OpenAI-compatible endpoint at https://api.cohere.ai/compatibility/v1
Models ossington-5 (256K), rosedale-1 (up to 1M), tofino-3, Augure Open (GLM-5.3, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next) Command A+ (May 20, 2026; 128K context, 64K output, text and images), Command A (256K), Command A Reasoning (256K, 32K output), Command R7B, Embed v5, Rerank v5
Embeddings and rerank Not in the API docs. Yes: Embed v5 Pro and Fast, Rerank v5 Pro and Fast.
Languages English and Quebec French natively. Command A+ lists 48 languages including all official EU languages; Command A Translate lists 23 including French.
Certifications SOC 2 and ISO 27001 in progress (readiness underway with Vanta, per https://augureai.ca/security). TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, UK Cyber Essentials, per its Trust Center.
Billing currency CAD, published per model and per seat. Trial keys free, not for production; legacy Command models priced in dollars; Command A+, North and private deployments on custom or unpublished terms.
Best fit Canadian professional teams and developers who want Canadian handling with nothing to provision. Enterprises and public bodies with platform teams, or anyone who needs embeddings, rerank or air-gapped deployment.

Where Cohere wins

  • Scale and backing. Cohere raised US$500 million at a US$6.8 billion valuation in August 2025. In September 2026 it was reported to be in talks for US$2 billion to US$3 billion at US$20 billion; that round was not confirmed closed when we checked.
  • Enterprise and government reach. The Government of Canada signed a memorandum of understanding with Cohere on August 19, 2025 to explore deploying AI across federal departments. North 2 bundles search, generation, agents, governance and audit for that buyer.
  • Deployment choice. Hosted platform, four cloud marketplaces, private VPC, and on-prem including air-gapped. In private deployments Cohere states it receives no prompts or outputs.
  • A fuller model catalogue. Embed v5 and Rerank v5 for retrieval, Command A Vision, Command A Translate, and Command A+ released under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face.
  • Certifications. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 listed, with reports available under NDA. Augure's SOC 2 and ISO 27001 programmes are still in progress.

Where Augure wins

  • A finished product at a published price. Free C$0, Pro C$20, Max C$80 per month, Enterprise custom, with SSO on Enterprise. No infrastructure project, no capacity to size.
  • Canadian inference available today. Customer data is stored in Canada, and inference runs on Canadian infrastructure and with vetted EU partners under zero-data-retention agreements, never routed to providers in the United States. rosedale-1 runs on Canadian inference in Ontario; tofino-3 and Augure Open never leave Canada; Canada-only accounts fail closed.
  • Jurisdiction. No US corporate parent and no US investors. Customer conversations, documents and AI inference are never handled by US-jurisdiction providers, so the CLOUD Act's reach over US-controlled providers does not extend to customer content. Limited US processing exists for payment card networks and email delivery only, documented in the privacy policy.
  • Quebec French. Native in Chat and the models, with Law 25 and Quebec regulatory context built in. Cohere's models list French among dozens of languages.
  • Published CAD API prices. ossington-5 C$1.50 input and C$3.00 output per 1M tokens; rosedale-1 C$2.50 and C$6.00; tofino-3 C$0.60 and C$2.00. As of 2026-10-27, Cohere's pricing page lists per-token prices for legacy Command models only and no price for Command A+.

What Cohere is building in Canada

Two projects matter, and both are dated. On June 18, 2026 Bell, Cohere, Hypertec and BUZZ HPC announced a three-year, roughly US$220 million agreement for 2,304 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs at Bell's Merritt, British Columbia data centre. HIVE, BUZZ's parent, expects it live in late 2026 to early 2027; The Globe and Mail reported construction underway and capacity doubling from 6.5 MW by early 2027. Separately, a CoreWeave-operated data centre in Cambridge, Ontario, with Cohere as a customer, was reported fully operational in August 2025. Expansion phases were due by summer 2026, with up to $240 million in federal funding toward a $725 million project. We found no 2026 statement confirming the later phases. Cohere's Trust Center still lists US-Central as the SaaS hosting region. Ask Cohere in writing which path and region apply to your account.

Switch from Cohere to Augure

  1. Create a key at https://augureai.ca/developers.
  2. Change the client and base URL. Augure speaks the OpenAI chat format at https://api.augureai.ca/v1 with Authorization: Bearer aug_sk_live_.... If you already use Cohere's Compatibility API, only the base URL, key and model id change.
  3. Map models.
Cohere model Augure model Why
command-a-plus-05-2026 ossington-5 Flagship reasoning, code, structured output, 256K context, images read on the gateway.
command-a-reasoning-08-2025 ossington-5 or rosedale-1 Reasoning tiers; rosedale-1 for tool loops and up to 1M context.
command-a-03-2025 ossington-5 with reasoning_effort: "none" Fast non-thinking answers at the flagship tier.
command-r7b-12-2024, command-a-translate-08-2025 tofino-3 Light tier, thinking always off, translation and extraction, served in Canada.
embed-v5, rerank-v5 No equivalent Augure's API docs list no embedding or rerank endpoint. Keep these on Cohere or another provider.
  1. Before and after in Python.
# Before: Cohere v2 SDK
import cohere
co = cohere.ClientV2(api_key=os.environ["COHERE_API_KEY"])
res = co.chat(
    model="command-a-plus-05-2026",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise this contract in two lines."}],
)
print(res.message.content[0].text)

# After: Augure
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.augureai.ca/v1", api_key=os.environ["AUGURE_API_KEY"])
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="ossington-5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise this contract in two lines."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)
print(resp.model_extra["_augure"]["inference_region"])
  1. Re-check. Streaming: Cohere emits typed events (content-delta); Augure uses OpenAI chunks with delta.content, usage in the final chunk with stream_options. Tools: Cohere returns tool_plan and takes tool results as document blocks; Augure uses OpenAI tool_calls and role: "tool" messages, and pins rosedale-1 for agent loops. Citations: Cohere's grounded citations have no direct equivalent; attach PDFs as file parts and ask for quoted passages instead. Output caps: 32,768 tokens, tofino-3 16,384. Omit max_tokens on reasoning models. reasoning_effort accepts none, minimal, low, medium, high on Augure; Cohere's compatibility layer accepts none and high only. response_format json_schema is prompt-enforced on reasoning models, so validate and retry once.
  2. Run both for a week on the same traffic, compare usage and output quality, then cut over.

Keep Cohere if

  • You need embeddings or rerank from the same vendor as generation.
  • You need an air-gapped or VPC deployment run by your own platform team.
  • You are a large enterprise or government body buying North with a negotiated contract.
  • You want Apache 2.0 weights for Command A+ to run yourself.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Is Cohere's API hosted in Canada?
Not per its Trust Center as of October 2026, which states the SaaS platform is hosted on Google Cloud in US-Central and that Cohere does not use servers outside the US. Canadian capacity is being built: a Bell data centre in Merritt, BC is expected live late 2026 to early 2027, and a CoreWeave-operated site in Cambridge, Ontario serves Cohere as a customer. Augure stores customer data in Canada today and offers a Canada-only account setting.
Which is better for a small Canadian law firm or clinic, Cohere or Augure?
Cohere sells models and an enterprise platform, North, with custom pricing and deployment paths that assume infrastructure staff. Augure sells a finished product at Free C$0, Pro C$20 and Max C$80 per month, plus an API priced in CAD. A twelve-person firm is usually describing Augure; a bank with a platform team may be describing Cohere.
How do I move code from the cohere Python SDK to Augure?
Replace cohere.ClientV2 with the openai package pointed at https://api.augureai.ca/v1, keep your messages list, and read choices[0].message.content instead of message.content[0].text. Map command-a-plus to ossington-5 and command-r7b to tofino-3. Embeddings and rerank have no Augure API equivalent.

Cohere (Command models, North) details are as published by the vendor on the date above and change often; confirm current terms with the vendor. Augure details are as stated in our privacy policy, including limited US processing for payment card networks and email delivery. Nothing here is legal advice. privacy policy

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