Together AI raised $305 million in a Series B funding round to expand its AI Acceleration Cloud that helps developers and enterprises train, fine-tune and run inference for generative artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The round valued the company at $3.3 billion, Together AI said in a Thursday (Feb. 20) press release.
“Our AI Acceleration Cloud uniquely provides organizations with the performance, security and functionality required to train frontier models and build production-scale AI applications with incredible cost efficiency,” Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash said in the release. “With this investment, we will accelerate our mission to make open source AI accessible for AI developers and customers globally.”
Together AI’s platform supports more than 200 open source models across all modalities — chat, image, audio, vision, code and embeddings — and is powered by the company’s proprietary Inference engine that delivers inference that it two to three times as fast as other solutions, according to the release.
The company’s inference and fine-tuning capabilities have been used by 450,000 AI developers, AI-native companies and global enterprises, the release said.
Together AI’s latest funding round was led by General Catalyst and co-led by Prosperity7 Ventures, per the release.
“Recent developments in open source AI illustrate the importance of Together AI’s work in making access to models like these secure, accessible and powerful for organizations here in the U.S. and around the world,” Prosperity7 Ventures Managing Director Abhishek Shukla said in the release. “Together AI’s ability to do this while accelerating the process, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs makes Together AI an exceptional resource for even large, global businesses.”
Together AI raised $106 million in a funding round led by Salesforce Ventures in March, with Prakash saying at the time in a blog post that the company had 45,000 registered developers and was seeing traffic grow three times month over month.
The company was valued at $1.25 billion in the March funding round, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
Salesforce Ventures also participated in Together AI’s latest funding round, according to the Thursday press release.
Cloud AI services provide a pay-as-you-go service that lets companies access advanced AI capabilities over the internet without needing expensive infrastructure or software, PYMNTS reported Feb. 10.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/
