Together, a startup focused on open source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure, has successfully closed a massive $102.5 million Series A funding round. This funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins and saw participation from industry giants Nvidia and Emergence Capital. The company plans to utilize this substantial capital injection to further expand its cloud platform, enabling developers to work with open and custom AI models.
Vipul Ved Prakash, the co-founder and CEO of Together, emphasized the growing demand for generative AI solutions that offer freedom from vendor lock-in. He believes that open source AI provides a strong foundation for a wide range of applications, with increasingly powerful generative models being developed regularly. Prakash stated, “We believe generative AI is a platform technology, a new operating system for applications, and will have a long-range impact on human society. The AI ecosystem will consist of proprietary models and open models, and it’s incredibly important that this future has choice and options.”
Together, founded in June 2022 by Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang, aims to democratize AI by creating open source models and services to help organizations seamlessly integrate AI into their applications. The company’s cloud platform offers scalable compute resources at competitive prices compared to major vendors like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure.
Currently, Together operates a cloud infrastructure in the U.S. and EU with a computing capacity of approximately 20 exaflops. Notable customers, including Pika Labs, NexusFlow, Voyage AI, and Cartesia, utilize Together’s model-serving APIs and cost-effective custom infrastructure for AI workloads.
Together also offers a consulting service called “Custom Models,” enabling customers to bring their data to the platform for the design, construction, and testing of tailored AI models. Additionally, the company actively invests in AI research and contributes to open source generative AI projects, including “RedPajama,” which aims to create chat models similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the release of fine-tuned AI models like “GPT-JT.”
With this substantial funding, Together is well-positioned to advance open source generative AI and provide more options for businesses and developers in the AI ecosystem.