The deal
Cohere has signed a letter of intent to acquire AISLE, both companies said on 15 October. A letter of intent is a step before a definitive agreement, and AISLE’s announcement says it will share more as the transaction progresses. No price or structure has been disclosed.
The reporting places AISLE differently depending on where you read it — the company was founded in 2024, and its own post says its Prague headquarters will become Cohere’s Prague office once the deal closes. The Globe and Mail reports that Cohere also plans a substantial investment in Prague to make the city its global hub for AI cybersecurity systems.
Three roles are named. Ondrej Vlcek, AISLE’s chief executive, would become senior vice-president of Cohere Cyber, a new division. Jaya Baloo would become Cohere’s global chief information security officer. Stanislav Fort would become vice-president of AI security, working with Cohere’s co-founder and chief technology officer Ivan Zhang.
The record being bought
AISLE builds systems that look for vulnerabilities in critical software and help fix them. It says it has found more than 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities that received CVE identifiers, across more than 100 codebases, in the past year.
The clearest evidence is in curl, the data transfer library that sits in effectively every connected device. AISLE says it found 18 of the 24 CVEs in curl’s most recent release, and that it was credited with all 12 vulnerabilities in OpenSSL’s January security release.
Daniel Stenberg, curl’s founder, published his own account on 14 October. He writes that AISLE’s work has produced no fewer than thirty-five published curl vulnerabilities and CVE identifiers, more than any other group or individual before, and that AISLE employees have authored several dozen commits in the project. He is careful about what he credits: not the tooling alone, but a large volume of detailed and accurate findings backed by a team of skilled humans, which he says has let the project fix vulnerabilities at a higher rate than ever before.
Why Cohere
Cohere sells models to enterprises and governments, where a security division is a product line rather than a cost centre. The company is separately combining with Germany’s Aleph Alpha, a deal the Globe and Mail says still needs regulatory approval, and the paper has previously reported Cohere in talks to raise over $3bn at a $20bn valuation.
Cohere’s chief executive Aidan Gomez wrote on LinkedIn that AISLE has done vulnerability finding better than many of the more well-known efforts. Vlcek wrote that the two companies began talking earlier this year and found combining a natural fit.
What to watch
Whether the letter of intent becomes a definitive agreement, and on what terms. Until it does, nothing has been bought. The second thing to watch is the curl numbers: a vulnerability-finding record built on one very heavily audited open-source project is a strong signal and a narrow one, and the question for a buyer is whether it generalises to the enterprise codebases Cohere sells into.
