SAN FRANCISCO: Together AI, the company making it dramatically cheaper and easier to run open source AI models at scale, today announced an $800 million Series C financing at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation. 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 financing comes as companies building with AI confront an uncomfortable truth: frontier-model pricing can eat 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 been pushing the frontier of inference, delivering industry leading performance for the demanding AI applications.

“Intelligence is becoming a foundational resource for the modern economy, every bit as essential 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, not expensive. The future of AI won't be owned by a few companies. It will be built by millions of developers and businesses, and open-source models are making that possible.”

Together AI's annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter, as open source model usage across the industry has tripled in twelve months. The company now serves thousands of paying customers, including many of the biggest names in AI like Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon. Customers report cost savings of 6x to 60x compared to closed-model pricing for equal or better performance - Decagon, for example, cut inference costs sixfold after moving to Together. It’s no surprise that nearly three-quarters of organizations expect to increase their use of open-source AI, according to McKinsey.

“Building AI infrastructure over the next decade will be the biggest 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 genuinely usable at enterprise scale, and the team's ambition matches the scale of the opportunity in front of them. We're proud to partner with them, not just on this round but on scaling compute and capacity globally.”

Together AI will use the new funding to expand its products and features as it becomes a leading provider of inference, and to dramatically scale its capacity and infrastructure footprint, which the company expects to grow roughly 50-fold over the next five years.

“History shows that the biggest technology shifts are won by open ecosystems that make innovation cheaper, faster and available to everyone,” added Prakash. “We believe AI will follow the same path.”

ADDITIONAL INVESTOR QUOTES

“Our investment in Together AI reflects our long-term conviction in artificial intelligence infrastructure and the 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-stage venturing platform supporting companies from early growth to late-stage scale-up as they evolve into global leaders.”

"AI and energy infrastructure are converging, and efficiency is the link between them," said Olivier Blum, CEO of Schneider Electric, investing through its venture fund SE Ventures. "Together AI has built a platform that makes open-source AI genuinely cost-effective at enterprise scale - and more efficient AI means less energy per workload. This is an excellent example of how the digital and energy transitions reinforce – and this is precisely where we are focused.”

“The shift toward open source isn't a niche preference anymore, it's becoming the default for any company that wants to scale AI without losing its margin,” said Joe Floyd, General Partner at Emergence Capital. “Together has the team, the infrastructure, and the customer base to lead that shift, and the growth speaks for itself.”

About Together AI

Together AI is the AI Native Cloud, combining state-of-the-art open-source models, high-performance infrastructure, and frontier research in AI efficiency and scalability. Founded in 2022, Together AI powers over a million developers and some of the world’s most demanding AI workloads, delivering production-scale inference, training, and reinforcement learning for the next generation of AI-native companies.

Fonte: Business Wire