Cohere opens Compass Cloud managed retrieval in private beta

Cohere has opened a private beta of Compass Cloud, bringing a managed version of its Compass enterprise search and retrieval platform to a limited group of enterprise teams. Developers can access the service through APIs, a dedicated Model Context Protocol server and a Python SDK.

With the managed option, Cohere operates the retrieval pipeline and model inference. The company said Compass had previously powered retrieval mainly for its North enterprise agent workspace and had also been shipped into self-hosted environments for partners in regulated industries. Those self-hosted deployments will remain available for projects with tighter privacy constraints, Cohere said, so Compass Cloud adds another deployment route rather than replacing them.

Compass is designed to retrieve company information for enterprise search, retrieval-augmented generation and agentic applications. In a retrieval-augmented generation system, a search layer finds relevant material before a model produces an answer. Cohere says Compass brings document parsing, dense and sparse embeddings, indexing, semantic and keyword search, reranking, and permission and retention controls into a single service. The company also lists connectors for SharePoint, OneDrive and Google Drive.

Developers can connect Compass to an existing stack through a dedicated Model Context Protocol server or use its APIs for more direct control over how content is represented, retrieved and ranked. Cohere’s public Python SDK includes clients for parsing files and for creating, deleting and searching documents in a Compass index. According to the repository, its parser and index clients communicate with hosted Compass servers through REST APIs.

Cohere also published an internal accuracy comparison. The company said Compass scored 81.1 nDCG@10, compared with 64.8 for an Azure Search configuration on High Finance, an internal, Cohere-annotated benchmark of financial documents. No independent replication was identified in a targeted search.

The service is not generally available. Cohere said it is accepting requests from a limited number of enterprise teams, but it did not disclose public pricing, beta capacity, supported cloud regions, service-level commitments or a general-availability date.