Together AI Raises $106M to Expand Open Source Generative AI Platform
Together AI, a startup offering cloud services and tools for open-source generative AI models, has raised $106 million in a Series C funding round led by Salesforce Ventures with other investors including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. Together has created a cloud platform for designing generative AI apps with open-source models and tools. It plans to leverage the new money to add new options and widen access to its large language models (LLMs) and services. The latest round comes just a few months after Together raised $102.5 million in its last funding round.
Together Shared
Together AI has emerged as a leading platform for developing and deploying open-source language models, computer vision models, and other generative AI systems. Its serverless APIs power over 45,000 developers building applications integrated with open source models. Together pitches itself as a decentralized cloud for generative AI where businesses can find and use open source AI models to suit their needs. They can use the cloud platform to fine-tune and run these models for what the company claims is significantly lower costs than Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon and AWS while still being more secure and easier to customize.
Together is known for its RedPajama-V2 dataset, the largest open dataset for training LLMs, which began with a 1.2 trillion token dataset that enterprises can use for pre-training models available for licensing. The name and outfit reference the popular children’s book Llama Llama Red Pajama. The new capital will fuel Together AI’s roadmap for enterprise-grade open-source generative AI, including international expansion of the company’s compute infrastructure and partnering with GPU cloud providers.
“Together AI has become one of the world’s favorite AI platforms for open-source models. Our serverless APIs for inference and fine-tuning have over 45,000 registered developers, with traffic growing 3x month over month,” Together CEO Vipul Ved Prakash explained in a blog post. “As organizations of all sizes develop their generative AI strategy they are leveraging open-source models due to the greater transparency, control, and ownership of what they build. Many of our customers are seeing success with fine-tuning an existing open-source model with private data and then deploying the model in conjunction with additional data sources through RAG, or agent style, multi-step, multi-model workflows. Generative AI is a new computing platform, and we aim to help developers everywhere build and deploy the next generation of applications.”
The funding comes amid a surge of open-source or semi-open access generative AI models, like Mistral, Llama 2, and most recently, the untrained version of X.ai’s Grok model. Open-source models are rapidly catching up to previously leading proprietary AI from big tech companies. Together, AI positions itself as an open, flexible cloud option as enterprises embrace the open-source approach for transparency, control, and customization. As generative AI evolves into a foundational computing paradigm, Together AI is staking a claim as the universal cloud fabric for developing open-source AI applications across industries.
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Open Source Generative AI Model Developer Together Raises $102.5M
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