Canadian AI company Cohere said on Thursday that it has signed a letter of intent to acquire AISLE, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup that uses artificial intelligence to find vulnerabilities in software. Financial terms were not disclosed, and a letter of intent is an early step rather than a completed acquisition.
The planned deal fits a larger reshaping already underway at Cohere. The company is assembling a broader enterprise business through its merger with German AI firm Aleph Alpha, a combination reported to be worth about 20 billion dollars. Adding AISLE would bring dedicated security and threat-detection capability into that combined group, aimed at enterprise and public-sector customers.
That focus on trust and control is central to the pitch. Cohere said the combined group would offer private deployment, allowing customers to run the technology on their own systems. For governments and large organizations handling sensitive data, where the software runs and who can access it often matters as much as what the model can do.
AISLE brings an unusually specific track record for a young company. Founded in 2025 by Ondrej Vlcek, the former chief executive of Czech antivirus maker Avast, together with co-founders from Google DeepMind and Anthropic, the startup says its AI found more than 500 previously unknown bugs in widely used software during its first year. That total included 12 vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, the widely used encryption library that helps secure traffic for banks, governments and messaging services. AISLE said those flaws were fixed after they were reported.
The location matters, too. AISLE has an engineering hub in Prague, so the acquisition would deepen Cohere's presence in Europe at the same time as the Aleph Alpha merger expands its footprint there. Cohere framed the move as continued investment in Europe and as a way to strengthen European AI capacity, a theme that has become more prominent as governments look for capable providers based closer to home.
The logic behind the deal is straightforward. As AI systems become more capable, they are changing both sides of cybersecurity: defenders can scan code and systems at a new scale, while attackers can look for weaknesses faster as well. Cohere's position, in paraphrasing its announcement, is that defensive tools need to keep pace with that change. A company selling AI to cautious enterprise and government buyers has a strong reason to own that defensive expertise directly, rather than treating security as an add-on.
There are still open questions. A letter of intent does not guarantee a closing, no price has been shared, and integrating a security startup into a company that is itself in the middle of a major merger will take careful work. Even so, the direction is clear. The next phase of competition among AI providers is not only about building more powerful models. It is also about assembling the surrounding business customers need to deploy those models safely: security, private infrastructure, regional presence and public-sector credibility. Cohere's move for AISLE is a bet that those pieces will help decide who wins enterprise business.