YouTube CFO Martin Kon exits to join AI startup Cohere

YouTube‘s CFO is moving on.

Martin Kon, who joined YouTube in 2019 and has been its chief financial officer since 2021, will leave Google Feb. 1 to become president and chief operating officer of artificial intelligence startup Cohere.

At YouTube, Kon worked on “all strategy, finance, business operations and commercial data analytics functions for YouTube globally,” according to his LinkedIn profile. He reported directly to Google’s corporate CFO and to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and managed teams in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Singapore.

Prior to joining YouTube, Kon was senior partner and tech, media, and telecoms managing director at Boston Consulting Group. Prior to that, he spent 20 years at management consulting group Oliver Wyman, where he headed its New York office and served as a partner and co-head of global communications, media, and technology practice.

In his new role at Cohere, he will be “focused on understanding enterprise customer needs, bringing commercial products and solutions to market, and helping businesses realize enormous value from harnessing the power of language models,” Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez said in a statement.

Toronto-based Cohere launched in 2019 and so far has raised $165 million in funding to “[help] businesses of all sizes better take advantage of language models in the real world—whether through predictive text generation like in copywriting, or through other functions like search, conversational AI, summarization and content moderation.”

“With Martin’s network and experience, I look forward to ushering in Cohere’s next chapter, one where we establish ourselves as the commercial leader of language AI,” Gomez added.