Together AI raises $800 million at $8.3 billion valuation

Together AI, a neocloud company—defined as a cloud infrastructure provider specializing in AI and GPU rentals—announced on Wednesday that it has raised an $800 million Series C funding round. A Series C round is a late-stage venture capital funding round. The company rents out GPU clusters, which are groups of Graphics Processing Units used for AI training and inference. The transaction values the company, which was founded in 2022, at $8.3 billion.

The funding round was led by Aramco Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco. Other participants in the funding round include:

• Nvidia
• Vista Equity Partners
• General Catalyst
• Emergence Capital
• March Capital
• Pegatron
• SentinelOne’s S Ventures

The capital injection comes as Together AI claims annual bookings of over $1.15 billion as of its last quarter. According to the company, usage of open source models has tripled across the industry in the past year, citing research from AI gateway OpenRouter. This shift is driven by companies increasingly adopting open source models over closed-source alternatives to avoid paying premiums on tokens. Together AI reports having thousands of paying customers, naming Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon among them. This market momentum has also benefited other neocloud providers. For instance, market peer Upscale AI raised $500 million at a $2 billion valuation, while TensorWave raised $350 million at a $1.55 billion valuation.

The Series C round represents a significant step up from Together AI’s previous financing. About 16 months ago, the company raised a $305 million Series B round at a $3.3 billion valuation. Prior to that, it raised a $102.5 million Series A round in 2023. In March, the media outlet The Information reported that Together AI was seeking $1 billion in funding at a $7.5 billion valuation. The finalized Series C terms show that while the company raised less capital than the rumored $1 billion, it secured a higher valuation of $8.3 billion compared to the rumored $7.5 billion. Together AI was co-founded by Vipul Ved Prakash, Percy Liang, and Ce Zhang. Prakash previously co-founded the social media search platform Topsy, which was sold to Apple in 2013 for a reported $200+ million.

Why it matters

The capital infusion highlights the growing corporate shift toward open source AI models, which offer a cost-effective alternative to expensive closed-source frontier models.