Together AI has successfully closed a substantial $800 million Series C funding round, achieving a valuation exceeding $8 billion. The investment was spearheaded by Aramco Ventures, with participation from notable investors including Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, and SentinelOne's S Ventures. This marks a remarkable acceleration in the company's growth trajectory, considering it raised $305 million at a $3 billion valuation just months earlier in February 2025.
The San Francisco-based company operates as a cloud platform specialising in open-source AI models, carving out a unique position between major hyperscalers and developers seeking alternatives to proprietary systems like OpenAI or Anthropic. Together AI's platform has witnessed explosive growth, with the company reporting over $1 billion in annual bookings and a tripling of open-source model usage over the past year. Key clients include Cursor, an AI coding tool, Cognition, the creator of Devin AI software engineer, and Decagon, an AI customer support startup.
What distinguishes Together AI from competitors is its focus on bundling compute power with proprietary inference optimisation software, which the company claims can reduce the cost of running popular models by up to 80 percent. Whilst rivals such as Groq and RunPod primarily concentrate on providing raw GPU capacity, Together AI's software layer represents a strategic moat in what might otherwise be a commoditised hardware business.
The founding team brings considerable credibility to the venture. CEO Vipul Ved Prakash previously founded Topsy, acquired by Apple for over $200 million in 2013. Co-founders Percy Liang, a Stanford computer science professor, and Ce Zhang, with appointments at ETH Zurich and the University of Chicago, provide deep academic research connections. Together AI plans to deploy the new capital towards expanding compute infrastructure and accelerating development of its inference engine. The participation of Aramco Ventures signals growing Middle Eastern investment in AI infrastructure rather than merely applications, though the startup faces formidable competition from hyperscalers with vastly greater capital resources.
Fuente Original: https://thenextweb.com/news/together-ai-800m-series-c-aramco-ventures
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