TORONTO: Canadian AI lab Cohere said Thursday that it had signed a letter of intent to buy AISLE, a San Francisco–based cybersecurity startup that uses artificial intelligence to detect vulnerabilities in software.

The acquisition would add cybersecurity to the business Cohere is assembling through its merger with Germany’s Aleph Alpha, a combination reportedly worth about $20 billion. It would also extend Cohere’s European footprint through AISLE’s engineering hub in Prague.

Cohere said the deal reflected its continued investment in Europe and would deepen its presence across the region, strengthening European AI.

The purchase is intended to boost the combined group’s security and threat-detection capabilities for enterprise and public-sector clients. Private deployment on a customer’s own system would be available.

“Increasingly capable AI systems are transforming both cybersecurity and the threats organizations face, and defensive capabilities must advance just as quickly,” Cohere said.

AISLE was founded in 2025 by Ondrej Vlcek, former CEO of the Czech antivirus maker Avast. Its co-founders come from Google DeepMind and Anthropic.

The company said its AI found more than 500 new bugs in widely used software during its first year. Among them were 12 vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, a free program that encrypts internet traffic for banks, governments, and messaging apps. Those flaws were fixed after their discovery.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.