Together AI raises $800M in Series C

Together AI Inc. has successfully raised $800 million in a Series C funding round, underscoring the escalating demand for AI-optimized public cloud solutions. This latest financing round was led by Aramco Ventures, with participation from Nvidia Corp., Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, and other institutional investors. The funding elevates Together AI's valuation to $8.3 billion, reinforcing its stature in the rapidly evolving field of AI-driven cloud services.

The funding will propel Together AI's ambition to enhance its cloud platform designed for open-source AI models. The company’s technology includes a serverless inference service that simplifies the deployment of AI models by eliminating the need for developers to manage graphics card and network configuration. This platform reportedly offers double the performance compared to its fastest competitors. Additionally, Together AI provides specialized inference services tailored for reliability, customization, and cost-efficiency, the latter offering up to a 50% price reduction for batch processing.

Central to Together AI's offerings is its proprietary ATLAS software engine, utilizing Nvidia chips. ATLAS employs speculative decoding, an innovative machine learning technique that accelerates customer workloads by using a lightweight model to initially process prompts. This model’s adaptability is a key differentiator, purportedly increasing inference speeds by 400% in some cases—crucial for maintaining accuracy over time. Beyond inference, Together AI facilitates the fine-tuning of open-source models with scalable training clusters, managed via Kubernetes or the more customizable Slurm.

Significantly, Together AI reported annual bookings of over $1.15 billion in the second quarter, with a customer base that includes notable entities such as LG Inc.’s AI lab, Cohere Inc., and the Mozilla Foundation. The influx of capital will primarily be directed towards ramping up the cloud’s infrastructure, targeting a fiftyfold increase in capacity over the next five years. This expansion will support the anticipated demand for enhanced training and inference functionalities.

The strategic investment from both tech giants and traditional investors like Aramco Ventures highlights a broader industry trend of integrating advanced AI capabilities with cloud infrastructure. This move intensifies competition among major cloud service providers, potentially reshaping market dynamics and capital allocation priorities. As Together AI scales, regulatory review and infrastructure deployment will be immediate focal points, likely influencing the sector’s development trajectory in the near term.