Together AI Raised $106 Million And Valued At $1.25 Billion In Latest Funding Round!

As interest in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry continues to grow because of rising capabilities coming out of AI-powered products and services, tech conglomerates and investment companies continue pouring in funds to be part of the rising tide.

In today’s latest development of the AI industry, research-driven AI company, Together AI, which contributes leading open-source research, models and datasets to advance the frontier of AI, announced it had some exciting news regarding investments to bolster its roadmap and its platform’s features.

So, what did Together AI announce and how will it help the company? Let’s explore!
 

What Did Together AI Announce?

 

• Through a blog post, Together AI Co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash announced that the company raised $106 million in a new round of financing.

• The funding round valued Together AI at $1.25 billion.

• The round was led by Salesforce Ventures, which is the corporate venture capital arm of Salesforce, with participation from Coatue Management, a lifecycle investment platform focused on turning big ideas into world-shaping technology companies.

• This includes support from existing investors Lux Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Emergence Capital, Prosperity7 Ventures, NEA, Greycroft, Definition Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Factory, Scott Banister and SV Angel.

• Furthermore, the funding round also witnessed participation from industry luminaries including Clem Delangue (CEO of HuggingFace) and Soumith Chintala (the creator of PyTorch).

• In a previous Series A funding round, the company announced it managed to raise $102.5 million. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from NVIDIA and Emergence Capital.

 

What Does Together AI Offer?

 

• “We believe the future of AI is open source” is how the company describes itself on its website and Together AI is one of the world’s favorite AI platforms for open-source models, as per the company.

• Together AI offers a platform to easily develop and deploy open-source models, as well as putting them into production in enterprise-grade applications.

• The company’s serverless APIs for inference and fine-tuning have garnered over 45,000 registered developers, as its traffic grows 3x month over month. This is credited to the platform’s superior performance, reliability, economics and deep expertise in building AI systems with accuracy and scale.

• This has even led to Together AI being integrated into AI application development frameworks including LangChain, Vercel, LlamaIndex, MongoDB, and EmbedChain.

• Together AI even offers decentralized cloud services powered by NVIDIA GPUs, which empower developers and researchers to train, fine-tune and deploy generative AI models.

 

How Will The New Funding Help Together AI?

 

• As per the company, the new funding will be used to expand its roadmap.

• This includes providing a platform for teams across the organization to easily, effectively and securely build and deploy generative AI solutions on open-source and custom models.

• It will also facilitate the company’s plans to expand its compute capacity internationally.

 

What Did Investors Say?

 

• Paul Drews, Managing Partner, Salesforce Ventures, said, "Drawing from our extensive experience and thematic work in the AI infrastructure realm and fostering collaborations with enterprise clients alongside the Salesforce Research team, it's evident: companies are moving towards an open-source approach in AI adoption, often augmented by closed-source technologies.”

• [Contd.] “Together AI has emerged as a leading solution to meet this open-source demand, and we're fully confident in the team's ability to bring this ambitious vision to fruition."

• Jade Lai, Partner, Coatue, said, “We believe that the future of generative AI depends on open research, open science, and trust between developers and enterprises.”

• [Contd.] “Together AI has emerged as an open-source leader through its contributions to the community, including research on compute optimizations, novel model architectures, and data curation. Combined with their focus on the developer experience, Together AI has thoughtfully designed the right API abstractions that will position them well to be a de facto platform for developers to build production AI apps in the future.”

Do you think Together AI’s latest funding round will help it improve its customer base? Do you think competing companies need to improve their offerings?

Let us know in the comments below!