Cohere signs letter of intent to acquire Prague cybersecurity firm Aisle

Cohere signed a letter of intent on 15 October to acquire Prague-based cybersecurity company Aisle, whose approximately 50 full-time employees are set to join the Toronto AI company, BetaKit reported.

Aisle’s approximately 50 employees will join Cohere

Aisle was launched in 2025 by Vlček, Jaya Baloo and Stanislav Fort. Vlček previously led antivirus company Avast, while Fort worked at Anthropic and DeepMind. The Prague company develops AI tools to find and repair weaknesses in software. Cohere intends to bring that work into its platform for large companies and governments.

Vlček will become senior vice-president of Cohere Cyber, the new cybersecurity unit. Baloo, an Aisle co-founder, is set to become Cohere’s global chief information security officer. Fort, Aisle’s co-founder and chief technology officer, will take the role of vice-president of AI security.

The proposed purchase would bring Cohere an established engineering hub as well as a cybersecurity product team. Aisle’s Prague headquarters, which houses an engineering hub, will become Cohere’s Prague office, the company said. An Aisle spokesperson told BetaKit that all of its approximately 50 full-time employees would join Cohere.

The agreement announced on 15 October is a letter of intent to acquire Aisle. Cohere’s plan to absorb its employees and create Cohere Cyber accompanies that proposed transaction, rather than an announcement that the purchase has closed.

Cohere says Aisle uncovered more than 500 vulnerabilities

Aisle’s systems can discover, validate and help repair previously unknown weaknesses in complex production software, Cohere said, according to PYMNTS. Cohere said the systems had uncovered more than 500 such vulnerabilities in Aisle’s first year.

Aisle said its AI security system identified 18 of 24 vulnerabilities corrected in the most recent version of widely used API-transfer software. Models from Anthropic and OpenAI found no issues in that comparison, according to Aisle’s account reported by BetaKit.

Cohere has presented security as part of its effort to sell AI to organisations moving from experiments into production. The company said businesses and governments face requirements spanning data protection, governance, regulatory compliance and software vulnerabilities, PYMNTS reported.

Those customers also want options for running AI in private clouds, on their own premises and in fully air-gapped environments, Cohere said. Its stated aim for the proposed acquisition is to combine AI models and agentic applications with cybersecurity capabilities in one platform.

Cohere already has a cybersecurity deployment outside the proposed Aisle purchase. AI Affairs reported that Bell Cyber and Cohere had put a Canadian-hosted cybersecurity model into production. The Aisle transaction would add a team that develops tools to identify and fix software vulnerabilities.

Prague joins Cohere’s European expansion

The proposed Aisle purchase extends Cohere’s European activity beyond Prague. Cohere is also set to acquire Germany’s Aleph Alpha, subject to regulatory approvals, and has bought Reliant AI, which is based in Montréal and Berlin, BetaKit reported.

Cohere said the Aisle acquisition would support its expansion in Europe, where it sees demand from governments and businesses for AI that meets security, privacy, compliance and data-sovereignty requirements. The planned Prague office would give that effort an engineering base drawn from Aisle’s existing headquarters.

The leadership appointments also put Aisle’s founders in roles across both the new cybersecurity unit and Cohere’s wider security organisation. Vlček will become senior vice-president of Cohere Cyber, Baloo will become global chief information security officer and Fort will become vice-president of AI security.