SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Together AI, the company making open source AI models significantly cheaper and easier to operate at scale, today announced $800 million in Series C funding at a post-money valuation of $8.3 billion. The round was led by Aramco Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, NVIDIA, March Capital, Pegatron, S Ventures (SentinelOne) and others.
The funding comes at a time when companies building with AI are confronting an uncomfortable truth: marginal model pricing can eat up their entire margin. Together, AI has emerged as the infrastructure layer for the alternative – helping companies train and run workloads on open models like DeepSeek, Nemotron, MiniMax and Kimi at a fraction of the cost of closed systems, with comparable or better performance. With one of the leading AI research labs in the world, Together AI has pushed the boundaries of inference and delivered industry-leading performance for demanding AI applications.
“Intelligence is becoming a fundamental resource for the modern economy, as important as electricity, bandwidth or capital,” said Vipul Ved Prakash, co-founder and CEO of Together AI. “Our mission is to ensure that intelligence is abundant and inexpensive. The future of AI will not belong to a few companies. It will be developed by millions of developers and companies, and open source models make this possible.”
Overall, annual AI bookings topped $1.15 billion last quarter as use of open source models across the industry tripled in 12 months. The company now serves thousands of paying customers, including many of the biggest names in AI like Cursor, Cognition and Decagon. Customers report 6x to 60x cost savings compared to closed pricing models with equal or better performance – Decagon, for example, saw their inference costs increase sixfold after switching to Together. It’s no surprise that, according to McKinsey, nearly three-quarters of companies expect increased use of open source AI.
“Building AI infrastructure in the next decade will be the largest infrastructure project in human history,” said Abhishek Shukla, managing director of Prosperity7 Ventures US, the diversified venturing program of Aramco Ventures. “Together has built the platform that makes open source models truly usable at enterprise scale, and the team’s ambition matches the scale of the opportunity ahead. We are proud to partner with them, not just in this round, but as they scale compute power and capacity globally.”
Together, AI will use the new funding to expand its products and capabilities to become a leader in inference, and to significantly expand its capacity and infrastructure, which the company expects to grow approximately 50x over the next five years.
“History shows that the biggest technological changes come from open ecosystems that make innovation cheaper, faster and available to everyone,” Prakash added. “We believe AI will follow the same path.”
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“Our investment in Together AI reflects our long-term belief in the artificial intelligence infrastructure and platforms that will enable AI deployment at scale,” said Meshal Almashari, Executive Managing Director, Late-Stage Venturing Program, Aramco Ventures. “It also demonstrates the strength of our multi-tiered venture capital platform, supporting companies from early growth to later scale-up on their path to becoming global leaders.”
“AI and energy infrastructure are growing together, and efficiency is the link between them,” said Olivier Blum, CEO of Schneider Electric, which invests through his venture fund SE Ventures. “Together, AI has built a platform that makes open source AI truly cost-effective at enterprise scale – and more efficient AI means less energy per workload. This is a great example of how the digital and energy transition is accelerating – and that’s exactly what we’re focused on.”
“Moving to open source is no longer a niche preference, but will become the standard for any company looking to scale AI without losing margin,” said Joe Floyd, general partner at Emergence Capital. “Together we have the team, infrastructure and customer base to drive this change, and the growth speaks for itself.”
About Together AI
Together AI is the AI Native Cloud that combines cutting-edge open source models, powerful infrastructure, and pioneering research in AI efficiency and scalability. Founded in 2022, Together AI supports over a million developers and some of the most demanding AI workloads in the world. It provides production-scale inference, training, and reinforcement learning for the next generation of AI-native companies.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260701243402/en/Together-AI-Raises-%24800-Million-at-%248.3-Billion-Valuation-to-Make-Frontier-AI-Accessible-to-All
