Cohere, a Toronto artificial intelligence start-up, has raised $250 million in new funding, two people with knowledge of the situation said, in yet another sign of feverish interest in a new kind of A.I. technology.

The deal values Cohere at about $2 billion, the people said. Investors include the internet software giant Salesforce, the chip maker Nvidia, the Toronto venture capital firm Inovia Capital and the Silicon Valley firm Index Ventures.

The start-up, which was founded in 2019, previously raised $170 million from investors including Index, Tiger Global and the well-known A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Pieter Abbeel.

Cohere builds technology that other businesses can use to deploy chatbots, search engines and other A.I.-driven products. It is among a small group of companies — including the tech industry’s giants and a handful of start-ups — that are building technology that could rival systems under development at OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that kicked off the generative A.I. boom in November with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT.