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On Fri, 21 Feb, 12:04 AM UTC
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Together AI Secures USD 305 Million to Expand AI Acceleration Cloud
Recently acquired CodeSandbox to integrate built-in code interpretation -- an industry first. San Francisco-based AI Acceleration Cloud provider Together AI has raised USD 305 million in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst and co-led by Prosperity7, pushing its valuation to USD 3.3 billion. The round saw participation from a group of global institutional and strategic investors, including Salesforce Ventures, DAMAC Capital, NVIDIA, Kleiner Perkins, March Capital, Emergence Capital, Lux Capital, SE Ventures, Greycroft, Coatue, Definition, Cadenza Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, Brave Capital, Scott Banister, and John Chambers. Also Read: Glassbox Raises USD 1.2 Million to Transform Spreadsheet for AI-Enabled Corporate Transactions With this investment, Together AI plans to expand its AI Acceleration Cloud, with large-scale deployments of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. "This strategic investment will further accelerate Together AI's position as the leading end-to-end platform for building with open source models," the AI company said on February 20. The platform, which offers enterprise-grade inference and fine-tuning capabilities, serves over 450,000 AI developers and global enterprises, including Salesforce, Zoom, SK Telecom, Hedra, Cognition, Zomato, Krea, Cartesia, and The Washington Post, enabling them to build AI applications. "Together AI's mission to be the full stack AI cloud is truly inspiring, and General Catalyst brings the go-to-market expertise and ambition to supercharge this goal," said Marc Bhargava, managing director at General Catalyst. Together AI claims to deliver the fastest DeepSeek-R1 and Llama inference at production scale through its infrastructure and research innovations. "AI is transforming every industry, creating unprecedented efficiencies and enabling entirely new classes of products. We have built a cloud company for this AI-first world -- combining state-of-the-art open source models and high-performance infrastructure, with frontier research in AI efficiency and scalability," said Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO of Together AI. "Our AI Acceleration Cloud uniquely provides organizations with the performance, security, and functionality required to train frontier models and build production-scale AI applications with incredible cost efficiency. With this investment, we will accelerate our mission to make open-source AI accessible for AI developers and customers globally," Prakash added. According to the official release, Together AI's platform spans the AI lifecycle, delivering enterprise-grade inference solutions, training and fine-tuning for frontier foundational models, agentic workflows with built-in code interpretation, and synthetic data generation. Also Read: Positron Raises USD 23.5 Million to Deliver Made-In-America AI Chips Supporting over 200 open-source models across all modalities -- chat, image, audio, vision, code, and embeddings -- the platform is powered by Together AI's proprietary inference engine and built on FlashAttention-3 kernels and advanced quantization techniques. It delivers 2-3x faster inference than today's hyperscaler solutions, the company stated. Together AI has secured 200 MW of power capacity and is deploying optimized Nvidia Blackwell GPU clusters across North America. In partnership with Hypertec, it is also co-building a 36,000 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 GPU cluster. Additionally, Together AI's Kernel Collection, a proprietary technology stack, delivers 24 percent faster training operationswhile significantly reducing costs for customers like Pika Labs. "Recent developments in open source AI illustrate the importance of Together AI's work in making access to models like these secure, accessible, and powerful for organizations here in the US and around the world," said Prosperity7 Ventures Managing Director Abhishek Shukla. "Together AI's ability to do this while accelerating the process, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs makes Together AI an exceptional resource for even large, global businesses." Also Read: AI-Powered Running Startup Ochy Secures USD 1.7 Million, Announces Adidas adiClub Integration Furthermore, Together AI's research lab continues to drive innovation with open-source contributions like Mixture of Agents, Medusa, Sequoia, Hyena, and Mamba. In 2024, Together AI grew its user base to over 450,000 AI developers and collaborated with Dell, Hypertec, Nvidia, and Meta. It deployed DeepSeek models in North American data centers with full opt-out privacy controls, launched the Together Enterprise Platform and AWS Marketplace availability, and partnered with Cartesia to enable ultra-low-latency voice AI through Sonic model integration. Additionally, Together AI recently acquired CodeSandbox and plans to integrate its capabilities directly into its platform for built-in code interpretation -- an industry first, the company said.
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Together AI raises $305M for its AI-optimized public cloud - SiliconANGLE
Cloud infrastructure startup Together AI Inc. has raised $305 million in new funding at a $3.3 billion valuation. Announced today, the Series B was co-led by General Catalyst and Prosperity7. It also included the participation of more than a dozen other investors. The consortium included Nvidia Corp., Salesforce Ventures and former Cisco Systems Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Chambers. San Francisco-based Together AI operates a public cloud optimized to run AI models. It enables developers to provision server clusters with upwards of thousands of graphics processing units. Together AI has equipped its data centers with several different Nvidia Corp. GPUs including the Blackwell B200, the chipmaker's latest and most capable processor. Together AI runs customers' AI models on a software system called the Inference Engine. According to the company, it can provide more than double the inference performance of the major public clouds. One way the software achieves that speed is by applying an algorithm called FlashAttention-3 to customers' AI models. Large language models analyze user input by taking into account contextual data such as past prompts. They do so using a component known as the attention mechanism. FlashAttention-3, the performance optimization algorithm used by Together AI, works by reorganizing the order in which an LLM's attention mechanism carries out computations. Additionally, the algorithm reduces the amount of data that the LLM has to move between the underlying GPU's logic circuits and HBM memory. Together AI's Inference Engine also implements a second performance optimization technology called speculative decoding. LLMs usually generate prompt responses one token, or unit of data, at a time. Speculative decoding allows LLMs to generate multiple tokens at once to speed up the workflow. According to Together AI, Inference Engine enables companies to deploy both off-the-shelf and custom models on its platform. For customers who opt to build custom LLMs, the cloud provider offers a suite of training tools called the Training Stack. Like the Inference Engine, it uses FlashAttention-3 to speed up processing. Together AI has created an open-source dataset with more than 30 trillion tokens to speed up customers' AI training efforts. For developers who wish to run an off-the-shelf LLM on its platform, the company provides a library of more than 200 open-source neural networks. A built-in fine-tuning tool makes it possible to customize those algorithms using an organization's training data. Together AI says that developers can launch fine-tuning projects with one command. "We have built a cloud company for this AI-first world -- combining state-of-the-art open source models and high performance infrastructure, with frontier research in AI efficiency and scalability," said Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. Today's funding announcement comes on the heels of the company reaching $100 million in annualized recurring revenue. Together AI says that its platform is used by more than 450,000 developers including engineers at Salesforce Inc., DuckDuckGo Inc. and the Mozilla Foundation.
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Together AI Raises $305M in Series B Funding to Enhance its AI Acceleration Cloud
The investment includes participation from notable investors such as Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, and Kleiner Perkins. California-based Together AI has announced a successful $305 million Series B funding round, led by General Catalyst and co-led by Prosperity7. The investment includes participation from notable investors such as Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, and Kleiner Perkins. The company aims to enhance its infrastructure with the deployment of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, which are expected to significantly improve the performance of AI applications. "Together AI is committed to making open-source AI accessible to developers and enterprises globally," the company stated. They emphasise the transformative potential of AI across industries and the importance of open-source solutions in driving innovation. This funding will bolster Together AI's position as a leader in providing an AI acceleration cloud tailored for open-source models and enterprise applications. Their infrastructure supports over 200 open-source models across various modalities, enabling organisations to build comprehensive AI applications efficiently. To accommodate its rapid growth, Together AI plans to expand its infrastructure significantly. This includes securing 200 MW of power capacity and deploying optimised clusters of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs across North American data centres. The funding will also support ongoing research initiatives to optimise AI performance and efficiency. The company's chief scientist, Tri Dao, highlighted their focus on leveraging advanced GPU architectures to redefine training and inference capabilities. Looking ahead, Together AI aims to continue its trajectory of innovation while ensuring that powerful AI systems remain accessible and cost-effective for all users. In 2023, the company also gained attention for securing a $102.5 million Series A investment from NVIDIA, Kleiner Perkins, and Emergence Capital. "Open source is the future of AI," said founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash, had said adding that "it will be a major thrust of how most organisations implement generative AI". But just last year, Simplismart, a Bengaluru-based startup led by former Oracle and Google engineers, has emerged as a leader in creating high-performance AI deployment tools. Founded by Amritanshu Jain and Devansh Ghatak, this Bangalore-based startup is garnering attention with its claim of having developed the fastest inference engine in the world, outpacing rivals like TogetherAI and FireworksAI.
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Together AI Raises $305 Million to Expand AI Cloud Service | PYMNTS.com
Together AI raised $305 million in a Series B funding round to expand its AI Acceleration Cloud that helps developers and enterprises train, fine-tune and run inference for generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. The round valued the company at $3.3 billion, Together AI said in a Thursday (Feb. 20) press release. "Our AI Acceleration Cloud uniquely provides organizations with the performance, security and functionality required to train frontier models and build production-scale AI applications with incredible cost efficiency," Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash said in the release. "With this investment, we will accelerate our mission to make open source AI accessible for AI developers and customers globally." Together AI's platform supports more than 200 open source models across all modalities -- chat, image, audio, vision, code and embeddings -- and is powered by the company's proprietary Inference engine that delivers inference that it two to three times as fast as other solutions, according to the release. The company's inference and fine-tuning capabilities have been used by 450,000 AI developers, AI-native companies and global enterprises, the release said. Together AI's latest funding round was led by General Catalyst and co-led by Prosperity7 Ventures, per the release. "Recent developments in open source AI illustrate the importance of Together AI's work in making access to models like these secure, accessible and powerful for organizations here in the U.S. and around the world," Prosperity7 Ventures Managing Director Abhishek Shukla said in the release. "Together AI's ability to do this while accelerating the process, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs makes Together AI an exceptional resource for even large, global businesses." Together AI raised $106 million in a funding round led by Salesforce Ventures in March, with Prakash saying at the time in a blog post that the company had 45,000 registered developers and was seeing traffic grow three times month over month. The company was valued at $1.25 billion in the March funding round, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Salesforce Ventures also participated in Together AI's latest funding round, according to the Thursday press release. Cloud AI services provide a pay-as-you-go service that lets companies access advanced AI capabilities over the internet without needing expensive infrastructure or software, PYMNTS reported Feb. 10.
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Together AI's Valuation Jumps To $3.3B After New Round
Together AI, a developer of a cloud platform to allow developers to build on open and custom artificial intelligence models, raised a $305 million funding round led by General Catalyst and Saudi Arabia's Prosperity7 Ventures. The new valuation is a more than 160% jump from The $1.25 billion it was valued at after Salesforce Ventures 1 led a $106 million round for Menlo Park, California-based startup last March. More than a dozen other investors joined the round, including Salesforce Ventures, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Coatue and others. Together AI recently surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, an increase from the $30 million in annualized revenue it had last February, per Bloomberg. AI startups continue to raise big-money rounds as if ordering a sandwich at a deli. Late last month, Anthropic, a ChatGPT rival with its AI assistant Claude, raised a $1 billion investment from previous investor Google. In Q4 last year alone, investors poured more than $42 billion into AI-related startups, per Crunchbase data. That was nearly twice as much money invested in Q3 2024 -- which was a record at the time. It also was about 3.5x the amount invested in Q4 2023.
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Together AI notches $3.3 billion valuation after latest fundraising
Feb 20 (Reuters) - Together AI said on Thursday it hit a valuation of $3.3 billion after a $305 million funding round. The funding round was led by General Catalyst. A string of other investors including Salesforce Ventures, chip giant Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and Coatue also participated in the round. The company was valued at $1.25 billion last year in a Salesforce Ventures-led funding round. Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence
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Together AI's $305M bet: Reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 are increasing, not decreasing, GPU demand
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More When DeepSeek-R1 first emerged, the prevailing fear that shook the industry was that advanced reasoning could be achieved with less infrastructure. As it turns out, that's not necessarily the case. At least, according to Together AI, the rise of DeepSeek and open-source reasoning has had the exact opposite effect: Instead of reducing the need for infrastructure, it is increasing it. That increased demand has helped fuel the growth of Together AI's platform and business. Today the company announced a $305 million series B round of funding, led by General Catalyst and co-led by Prosperity7. Together AI first emerged in 2023 with an aim to simplify enterprise use of open-source large language models (LLMs). The company expanded in 2024 with the Together enterprise platform, which enables AI deployment in virtual private cloud (VPC) and on-premises environments. In 2025, Together AI is growing its platform once again with reasoning clusters and agentic AI capabilities. The company claims that its AI deployment platform has more than 450,000 registered developers and that the business has grown 6X overall year-over-year. The company's customers include enterprises as well as AI startups such as Krea AI, Captions and Pika Labs. "We are now serving models across all modalities: language and reasoning and images and audio and video," Vipul Prakash, CEO of Together AI, told VentureBeat. The huge impact DeepSeek-R1 is having on AI infrastructure demand DeepSeek-R1 was hugely disruptive when it first debuted, for a number of reasons -- one of which was the implication that a leading edge open-source reasoning model could be built and deployed with less infrastructure than a proprietary model. However, Prakash explained, Together AI has grown its infrastructure in part to help support increased demand of DeepSeek-R1 related workloads. "It's a fairly expensive model to run inference on," he said. "It has 671 billion parameters and you need to distribute it over multiple servers. And because the quality is higher, there's generally more demand on the top end, which means you need more capacity." Additionally, he noted that DeepSeek-R1 generally has longer-lived requests that can last two to three minutes. Tremendous user demand for DeepSeek-R1 is further driving the need for more infrastructure. To meet that demand, Together AI has rolled out a service it calls "reasoning clusters" that provision dedicated capacity, ranging from 128 to 2,000 chips, to run models at the best possible performance. How Together AI is helping organizations use reasoning AI There are a number of specific areas where Together AI is seeing usage of reasoning models. These include: Agentic AI is also driving increased demand for AI infrastructure Together AI is also seeing increased infrastructure demand as its users embrace agentic AI. Prakash explained that agentic workflows, where a single user request results in thousands of API calls to complete a task, are putting more compute demand on Together AI's infrastructure. To help support agentic AI workloads, Together AI recently has acquired CodeSandbox, whose technology provides lightweight, fast-booting virtual machines (VMs) to execute arbitrary, secure code within the Together AI cloud, where the language models also reside. This allows Together AI to reduce the latency between the agentic code and the models that need to be called, improving the performance of agentic workflows. That's one of the reasons why Nvidia keeps rolling out new silicon that provides more performance. Nvidia's latest product chip is the Blackwell GPU, which is now being deployed at Together AI. Prakash said Nvidia Blackwell chips cost around 25% more than the previous generation, but provide 2X the performance. The GB 200 platform with Blackwell chips is particularly well-suited for training and inference of mixture of expert (MoE) models, which are trained across multiple InfiniBand-connected servers. He noted that Blackwell chips are also expected to provide a bigger performance boost for inference of larger models, compared to smaller models. The competitive landscape of agentic AI The market of AI infrastructure platforms is fiercely competitive. Together AI faces competition from both established cloud providers and AI infrastructure startups. All the hyperscalers, including Microsoft, AWS and Google, have AI platforms. There is also an emerging category of AI-focussed players such as Groq and Samba Nova that are all aiming for a slice of the lucrative market. Together AI has a full-stack offering, including GPU infrastructure with software platform layers on top. This allows customers to easily build with open-source models or develop their own models on the Together AI platform. The company also has a focus on research developing optimizations and accelerated runtimes for both inference and training. "For instance, we serve the DeepSeek-R1 model at 85 tokens per second and Azure serves it at 7 tokens per second," said Prakash. "There is a fairly widening gap in the performance and cost that we can provide to our customers."
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Startup Together AI Valued at $3.3 Billion as AI Demand Grows
Startup Together AI, which provides users access to artificial intelligence computing, has raised $305 million from investors in deal led by General Catalyst, bringing the valuation of the company to $3.3 billion -- a signal that corporate demand for AI is still strong. Saudi Arabia's Prosperity7 Ventures co-led the round, which also included Salesforce Ventures, Nvidia Corp., Kleiner Perkins, Emergence Capital, Lux Capital and other investors.
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Together AI, a San Francisco-based AI Acceleration Cloud provider, has raised $305 million in Series B funding, valuing the company at $3.3 billion. The investment will be used to expand its AI infrastructure and enhance its position in the open-source AI model market.
Together AI, a San Francisco-based AI Acceleration Cloud provider, has successfully raised $305 million in a Series B funding round, catapulting its valuation to $3.3 billion 12. The funding round was led by General Catalyst and co-led by Prosperity7, with participation from a diverse group of investors including Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, and Kleiner Perkins 13.
The primary goal of this substantial investment is to expand Together AI's AI Acceleration Cloud, with a focus on large-scale deployments of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs 1. The company plans to secure 200 MW of power capacity and deploy optimized NVIDIA Blackwell GPU clusters across North America 14. This expansion aims to solidify Together AI's position as a leading end-to-end platform for building with open-source models.
Together AI's platform boasts several cutting-edge features:
Together AI has experienced significant growth, now serving over 450,000 AI developers and global enterprises 12. The platform has attracted notable clients such as Salesforce, Zoom, SK Telecom, and The Washington Post 1. In 2024, the company expanded its partnerships, collaborating with Dell, Hypertec, NVIDIA, and Meta 1.
The company recently surpassed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue, a substantial increase from the $30 million reported in February of the previous year 5. This growth reflects the increasing demand for AI infrastructure and services in the rapidly evolving AI market.
Together AI recently acquired CodeSandbox and plans to integrate its capabilities directly into its platform for built-in code interpretation, marking an industry first 1. The company continues to drive innovation through its research lab, with open-source contributions like Mixture of Agents, Medusa, Sequoia, Hyena, and Mamba 1.
The AI infrastructure market is becoming increasingly competitive, with other startups like Simplismart in Bengaluru also developing high-performance AI deployment tools 3. However, Together AI's significant funding and technological advancements position it strongly in the market for open-source AI accessibility and enterprise-grade solutions.
As AI continues to transform industries and create new efficiencies, Together AI's mission to make open-source AI accessible globally aligns with the growing demand for powerful, cost-effective AI systems 34. The company's focus on combining state-of-the-art open-source models with high-performance infrastructure and frontier research in AI efficiency and scalability sets it apart in the rapidly evolving AI landscape 12.
Reference
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Analytics India Magazine
|Together AI Raises $305M in Series B Funding to Enhance its AI Acceleration Cloud[5]
Together Fund, a venture capital firm founded by tech entrepreneurs, is set to close its $150 million Fund-II by June, with a strong focus on AI startups. The firm plans to support 19-20 companies in the AI segment, leveraging India's strengths in AI applications.
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Elon Musk's AI company xAI raises $6 billion in Series C funding, with plans to expand its Colossus supercomputer and develop advanced AI models to compete with industry leaders.
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14 Sources
Simplismart, an AI startup founded by ex-Oracle and Google engineers, secures $7 million in Series A funding to enhance its MLOps platform and inference engine, aiming to simplify AI adoption for enterprises with improved performance and control.
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4 Sources
Cohere, a prominent AI startup, recently secured $500 million in funding, reaching a $5.5 billion valuation. However, the company subsequently laid off 20% of its workforce, signaling a strategic realignment in the competitive AI landscape.
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13 Sources
OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, is reportedly in discussions for a new funding round that could value the company at $150 billion. This move comes as the AI race intensifies and development costs soar.
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