Together AI raises $800M at $8.3B valuation as companies shift to cost-effective AI models

Neocloud Together AI raises $800M, leaps to $8.3B valuation

Together AI, an AI neocloud founded in 2022, has raised an $800 million Series C at an $8.3B valuation, the company announced on Wednesday. The round was led by Aramco Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, SentinelOne's S Ventures and others. Together AI last raised a $305M Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation about 16 months ago. It actually came out of gate well funded, with a $102.5 million Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Nvidia and Emergence Capital back in 2023. There were whispers of this round back in March, when The Information reported that the company was seeking $1 billion in funding, but at a $7.5 billion valuation. So, if the numbers in that report were accurate, that means that Together AI took less money, but perhaps got a better deal from VCs than it had been pursuing in the spring. The hefty infusion of capital comes as Together AI claims annual bookings of over $1.15 billion as of its last quarter, as companies increasingly adopt competent yet far less expensive open source models via neocloud providers like Together AI. They are increasingly turning to this option rather than pay the premiums on tokens for closed frontier models for all their AI usage. This has tripled usage of open source models across the industry in the past year, Together AI says, pointing to research from another company cashing in on the trend, AI gateway OpenRouter. Together AI says it has thousands of paying customers naming Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon among them. That means that neoclouds, which are the companies providing AI-specific hardware (often Nvidia GPU clusters) and other infrastructure tools, have been hot commodities for VC investment. Upscale AI raised a Series A plus an A extension totaling $500 million at a $2 billion valuation last month; TensorWave -- which focuses on GPU clusters from AMD -- raised a $350 million Series B at $1.55 billion valuation last month as well, to name just two recent examples. Together AI was co-founded by Vipul Ved Prakash (pictured above, middle) after he sold his previous startup, social media search platform Topsy, to Apple in 2013 for reported $200+ million. His Together AI co-founders are Stanford professor Percy Liang (left) and ETH Zürich/University of Chicago associate professor Ce Zhang (right).

Together AI raises $800 million at $8.3 billion valuation

July 1 (Reuters) - Together AI on Wednesday said it has raised $800 million in a funding round led by Aramco Ventures (2222.SE), opens new tab, more than doubling the artificial intelligence startup's valuation to $8.3 billion. Founded in 2022, the startup's platform lets companies train and run AI workloads on open models such as DeepSeek, MiniMax and Kimi at lower costs than closed systems. Reporting by Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru; Editing by Jonathan Ananda Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

As Companies Race for Cheaper A.I. Options, This Start-Up Pitches a Solution

Together AI, which specializes in open-source artificial intelligence models, is now worth more than $8 billion. In recent weeks, two related developments have threatened to reshape the fast-moving artificial intelligence boom: Companies using the most advanced A.I. tools have begun to balk at the cost, and new open-source models from China have become nearly as powerful as the proprietary technology from large U.S. labs. For Vipul Ved Prakash, a co-founder and the chief executive of Together AI, a start-up specializing in open-source A.I., that confluence creates a window of opportunity. Company margins "are being eaten" by the costs of using closed models, like those offered by OpenAI and Anthropic, Mr. Prakash said. Executives have begun to push back against "token-maxxing" -- tokens being the units of data used by A.I. models -- while searching for solutions to keep expanding their use of the technology. As companies adopt open-source models, which can be used and modified freely, Together AI's business has surged. The venture capital community has taken notice. On Wednesday, Together AI announced an $800 million funding round at an $8.3 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $1.3 billion. The new round was led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state oil company, with participation from Nvidia, Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst and others. Mr. Prakash, a serial entrepreneur and former Apple executive, founded the San Francisco-based Together AI with four academics in 2022. The company's chief scientist, Tri Dao, wrote FlashAttention, a seminal algorithm for improving model speed, which is now a core part of Together AI's product. Demand for Together AI's products is soaring. In the past year, the company has seen a 10,000-fold increase in the number of tokens it processes per month. Last quarter, the annual rate of its revenue grew to $1.2 billion. Together AI's growth is a testament to the rising demand for open-source models, many of which are made in China. In June, a Chinese start-up, Z.ai, released an A.I. model with abilities similar to Anthropic's powerful Fable and Mythos models. Some experts are worried about U.S. companies' adoption of Chinese open-source models. They cite concerns that the models are built by companies connected to the Chinese government and that the developers have illicitly leveraged American technology. Despite those misgivings, the relatively low price of Chinese models is enticing. They can be one-fiftieth the cost to use compared with their American counterparts on a per-token basis, according to a recent J.P. Morgan report. Open-source processing on OpenRouter, an A.I. model marketplace, rose to 65 percent in June from 34 percent in January, according to a Citi analysis that Reuters reported. Microsoft, which helped foster the A.I. boom with its early investment in OpenAI, is considering hosting a version of DeepSeek, an open-source Chinese model, on its Copilot program. Together AI helps give companies access to those cheaper open-source models to power their A.I. products. The company rents and buys A.I. computing chips and uses specialized software to run A.I. models faster and more efficiently for customers -- a process called "inference." The start-up then offers hundreds of open-source models on those chips that can be tailored to a company's needs, removing a firm's need to hire an engineering team to do that on its own. Ashwin Sreenivas, a co-founder of the A.I. start-up Decagon, said using Together AI had saved his company a "massive" amount. Decagon, which makes an A.I. customer service product, uses a mix of closed models from leading A.I. companies like OpenAI as well as open-source models from Together AI. Mr. Sreenivas estimated that tasks moved from closed models to Together AI cost one-fifth to one-seventh as much. The demand for open-source models is surging as Anthropic and OpenAI gear up for major public offerings. "As they are going to the public markets, a lot of other companies are thinking of a future without them," said Mr. Prakash, Together AI's chief executive. Last week, The New York Times reported that OpenAI was considering delaying its offering, in part because of financial challenges. Together AI plans to spend most of its newly raised capital on research and development. It's also leveraging some of its funding to build out more compute capacity. To do so, its investors are proving helpful, including by introducing Together AI "to the right people who might be looking at building more capacity," Abhishek Shukla, a managing director at Prosperity7, said. The competition among companies hosting open-source models is hot. Last month, Together AI's rival Baseten raised $1.5 billion at a $13 billion valuation. Another competitor, Cerebras, held an I.P.O. in May and now has a market value of around $50 billion. Mr. Shukla believes that Together AI will try to follow suit. The company, he said, is "headed towards the public markets."

Together AI raises 800 million dollars in Series C led by Aramco Ventures

Together AI raised 800 million dollars at an eight billion dollar valuation, led by Aramco Ventures, to scale its open-source AI cloud platform. Together AI has raised 800 million dollars in a Series C round led by Aramco Ventures, valuing the company at more than eight billion dollars. The round also drew Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, and SentinelOne's S Ventures. Together AI says it now generates more than one billion dollars in annual bookings and that usage of open-source models on its platform has tripled over the past year, according to data it cites from OpenRouter. The valuation represents a sharp jump. Together AI raised 305 million dollars in a Series B in February 2025 at a valuation of roughly three billion dollars, led by General Catalyst and Prosperity7, the venture arm of Aramco. Before that, it closed a 102 million dollar Series A in November 2023 from Kleiner Perkins, and The Information reported in March that the company was in talks to raise one billion dollars at a valuation near seven and a half billion dollars. Together AI operates as a cloud platform for running open-source AI models, positioning itself between the hyperscalers and the developers who want alternatives to closed systems from OpenAI or Anthropic. Its customers include Cursor, the AI coding tool, Cognition, the maker of the Devin AI software engineer, and Decagon, an AI customer support startup. The company says it will use the new capital to expand its compute infrastructure and accelerate development of its inference engine. The founding team lends the company academic credibility. Co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash previously built Topsy, the social analytics company Apple acquired in 2013 for more than 200 million dollars. Co-founders Percy Liang, a Stanford computer science professor, and Ce Zhang, who has held positions at ETH Zurich and the University of Chicago, bring deep research ties to the company, which was founded in 2022. The raise lands in a market pouring capital into AI infrastructure at an unprecedented pace, with neocloud valuations soaring as demand for GPU compute continues to outstrip supply. Upscale AI closed a 190 million dollar extension in June, bringing its total funding to 500 million dollars at a two billion dollar valuation. TensorWave, which builds its cloud on AMD chips rather than Nvidia's, raised 350 million dollars in a Series B at a valuation near one and a half billion dollars. Together AI's open-source bet sets it apart from the neocloud pack. While rivals like Groq and RunPod focus primarily on renting out raw GPU capacity, Together AI bundles compute with its own inference optimisation software, which it says can cut the cost of running popular models by up to 80 percent. That software layer is the moat the company is building around what would otherwise be a commodity hardware business. Aramco Ventures leading the round signals growing Middle Eastern interest in the infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence, rather than just the models themselves. The question for Together AI is whether its open-source positioning and software edge can hold as the hyperscalers, flush with hundreds of billions in capital spending, build out their own inference capabilities at a scale no startup can match.

Together AI raises $800M to grow its AI-optimized public cloud

Together AI Inc., the operator of a cloud platform optimized to run open-source artificial intelligence models, has raised $800 million from investors. The startup stated in its funding announcement today that the Series C deal was led by Aramco Ventures. Nvidia Corp., Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst and several other institutional backers contributed as well. Together AI is now worth $8.3 billion. Together AI's platform includes a serverless inference service that developers can use to run open-source AI models. It removes the need to configure graphics cards and network equipment. According to the company, its serverless environments provide about twice the performance of the fastest alternative. Together AI also sells three other inference services. Two use dedicated infrastructure that offers more reliability guarantees and customization options than the company's serverless offering. The third service, Batch Inference, prioritizes cost-efficiency over speed. It provides an up to 50% price reduction for models that don't require the ability to immediately answer user prompts. Under the hood, Together AI's platform is powered by Nvidia chips and a custom software engine called ATLAS. It uses a machine learning technique called speculative decoding to speed up customer workloads. Speculative decoding enables engineers to integrate their AI model with a second, lighter neural network. When a user enters a prompt, the lighter algorithm quickly generates a draft response. The main model then checks it for errors, makes any changes that may be necessary and delivers the prompt response to the user. That process is considerably faster than having the main model generate the output on its own. Usually, the lightweight algorithm that creates draft responses has a fixed configuration. Models with a fixed configuration often become less accurate over time. According to Together AI, its ATLAS technology addresses the issue by automatically adapting the lightweight model to changes in user requirements. The company claims that its software can speed up some inference workloads by 400%. Customers can also use Together AI's platform to fine-tune open-source models. The company provides access to training clusters with up to thousands of graphics cards. Developers can manage the clusters using Kubernetes, which is relatively easy to use, or a tool called Slurm that offers more customization options. One of the main challenges involved in AI training projects is that graphics cards sometimes experience technical issues. In some cases, chip failures can introduce errors into the training workflow. Together AI's training clusters include software that automatically detects and remediates technical issues. The company disclosed today that its annual bookings topped $1.15 billion in the second quarter. Its platform is used by several thousand organizations including LG Inc.'s AI research lab, Cohere Inc. and the Mozilla Foundation. Together AI will use its newly raised capital to buy more infrastructure. The company hopes to grow its public cloud's capacity by a factor of 50 over the next five years. In addition, Together AI plans to enhance its training and inference features. Photo of Together AI's founders: Together AI

Together AI Raises $800 Million to Scale Cheaper Open-Source Models | PYMNTS.com

The round valued the company at $8.3 billion, according to a Wednesday (July 1) press release. Together AI was previously valued at $3.3 billion in a February 2025 Series B funding round in which it raised $305 million. Companies can use Together AI's infrastructure layer to train and run workloads on open models that can deliver performance comparable to or better than closed models, at a fraction of the cost, according to the release. The industry's usage of open-source models has tripled over the last 12 months, and Together AI's annual bookings topped $1.15 billion last quarter, the release said. Together AI now serves thousands of paying customers. One reported that after moving to Together AI, it cut its inference costs sixfold, per the release. With the new funding, Together AI will expand its products and features as well as scale its capacity and infrastructure footprint. In a Wednesday blog post, Together AI Co-Founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash said that in addition to the equity capital, the company secured commitments for over 500 megawatts of compute capacity that will be capitalized independently by investors to support its expected growth. In the company's press release, Prakash said: "Our mission is to ensure that intelligence is abundant, not expensive. The future of AI won't be owned by a few companies. It will be built by millions of developers and businesses, and open-source models are making that possible." The company's latest funding round was led by Aramco Ventures. Abhishek Shukla, managing director of Aramco Ventures' diversified venturing program, Prosperity7 Ventures US, said in the release that the firm's partnership with Together AI is part of its effort to scale compute and capacity globally. "Together AI has built the platform that makes open-source models genuinely usable at enterprise scale, and the team's ambition matches the scale of the opportunity in front of them," Shukla said. It was reported in June that companies that encouraged their employees to use AI tools when the costs were lower are now using a variety of methods to cut back, including the adoption of open-source models.