Cohere Moves to Buy AI Cybersecurity Startup AISLE
The Canadian AI lab signed a letter of intent on Thursday to acquire AISLE, the startup founded by former Avast chief Ondrej Vlcek whose AI says it found more than 500 new software bugs in its first year. Terms were not disclosed.
Cohere said on Thursday it signed a letter of intent to buy AISLE, a San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence to find flaws in software. The terms were not disclosed.
AISLE was founded in 2025 by Ondrej Vlcek, the former chief executive of Czech antivirus maker Avast. Its co-founders come from Google DeepMind and Anthropic. The company says its AI found more than 500 previously unknown bugs in widely used software in its first year, including 12 flaws in OpenSSL, the free program that encrypts internet traffic for banks, governments and messaging apps. The flaws were fixed after they were reported.
The deal folds AISLE’s team into a new unit called Cohere Cyber. Vlcek will lead it as a senior vice president, Cohere told Reuters. AISLE chief operating officer Jaya Baloo will become Cohere’s global chief information security officer, and chief scientist Stanislav Fort will lead AI security research as a vice president, working with Cohere co-founder and chief technology officer Ivan Zhang. All 50 of AISLE’s full-time employees will join Cohere.
The acquisition also adds cybersecurity to the business Cohere is assembling through its merger with Germany’s Aleph Alpha, a combination reported to be worth about $20 billion. It extends Cohere’s European footprint through AISLE’s engineering hub in Prague. Cohere said the deal reflects its continued investment in Europe and will deepen its presence across the region.
Cohere says the combined group will sell security and threat-detection tools to enterprise and public-sector clients, with private deployment available on the customer’s own system. “Increasingly capable AI systems are transforming both cybersecurity and the threats organizations face, and defensive capabilities must advance just as quickly,” the company said.
Cohere raised $500 million in August at a $6.8 billion valuation, with backers including AMD Ventures and Nvidia, according to TradingView. A letter of intent is not a done deal: neither company announced a price or a closing date.
