Cloud generative AI vendor Together AI on Thursday revealed it acquired startup Refuel.ai for an undisclosed amount.
Refuel.ai specializes in transforming unstructured data into structured datasets for AI applications.
Refuel and Together
The data management vendor was founded in 2021 by Stanford alumni Rishabh Bhargava and Nihit Desai. It has a family of models for data tasks and a platform called Refuel Cloud that enables engineering teams to develop multi-step data workflows. The San Francisco-based startup has raised about $5.2 million since its founding four years ago.
Meanwhile, Together AI has grown quickly since its founding in 2022. As an open source generative AI (GenAI) platform provider, the 2022 startup has raised about $533 million over four funding rounds. Its latest round was in February, when it raised $305 million. The vendor competes against vendors such as Groq in the AI inference market. It also focuses heavily on open source.
The vendor offers many off-the-shelf products for fine-tuning and running large language models (LLMs) and offers a selection of tools for fine-tuning models.
Quality data
The acquisition is fitting for Together AI because GenAI models require quality data and the ability to customize the model with data so that the models learn about their application better, said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. He added that Refuel has software for preparing enterprise data for AI models. Users can also label the data and feed it into the model, improving the quality of the model.
“I think of it as a complementary acquisition,” he said. “Together AI is primarily an infrastructure company, and primarily with Refuel, they’re getting some very interesting data assets.”
He added that data is essential regarding whether AI models are reliable.
“Enterprise data and how we effectively combine enterprise data makes a world of difference in terms of the kind of accuracy and input we can get out of generative AI applications,” Chandrasekaran continued.
While Together AI has seen significant growth in the last four years, Refuel also considers the acquisition a chance to scale.
“It’s an important milestone for us as a company,” Bhargava said. “Joining together and joining forces was the way to scale and deliver on our ambition. We want to solve and help enterprises build these enterprise AI applications and get AI up and running.”
With the acquisition, the Refuel LLM-2 will now be available on Together AI’s platform. The model was already part of Together AI’s inference service.
“Just the amount of reach that Refuel’s technology already has because it’s part of Together is kind of a first advantage,” said Charles Zedlewski, chief product officer at Together AI. “From Together’s point of view, this is giving our developers more building blocks to build more sophisticated agents.”
Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering AI software and systems.
Source: https://www.techtarget.com/
