Together AI Announces $800M Series C to Accelerate the Shift to Open-Source AI

Together AI, the AI native cloud, led by Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Ré, Tri Dao, and Percy Liang, has announced Series C funding of $800 million from Aramco Ventures, NVIDIA, Vista Equity, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Schneider Electric, Pegatron, Salesforce Ventures, March Capital, DTCP Growth, Lux Capital, Geodesic, PSP Partners, and others. In addition to the equity capital, Together AI has secured commitments for over 500 MW of compute capacity to be capitalized independently by our new investors to support our expected compute growth in the coming years.

The Founding Vision.

Together AI was founded four years ago with the belief that generative AI represents a major turning point in human progress. The founders set out to ensure this technology would remain open and widely accessible, rather than concentrated within a small number of dominant providers.

Since then, the company has built a full-stack platform for open-source AI, combining frontier research with high-performance inference systems optimized for AI applications and agents. Today, Together AI supports thousands of customers, including fast-growing AI companies such as Cognition, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Cursor, and Suno. The company describes its growth as exceeding early expectations, driven by strong demand for open and efficient AI infrastructure.

The Economics of Production AI.

As AI systems move from prototypes to core production infrastructure, they are increasingly used for real intellectual labor, writing code, resolving customer issues, analyzing documents, and automating workflows. This shift is driving a rapid increase in inference demand at scale.

At the same time, many companies are discovering that the economics of closed frontier models often break down in production. What starts as manageable usage at the prototype stage can quickly become cost-prohibitive as deployment scales, forcing organizations to limit usage even as demand grows.

Together AI positions itself as a production platform for open and custom AI, combining frontier models with optimization across the full inference stack. Open-weight models such as DeepSeek, Nemotron, MiniMax, Kimi, and GLM are increasingly competitive with proprietary systems while offering greater flexibility and significantly lower costs. In some cases, companies report 6x–20x improvements in inference cost efficiency after adopting open models and optimized infrastructure.

Beyond models, production AI economics are shaped by the entire stack, including kernels, compilers, inference systems, training infrastructure, and hardware utilization. Together AI continues to expand its research-to-production pipeline with advancements in systems optimization, post-training APIs, and high-performance inference endpoints, supporting large-scale deployment of open-source AI globally.

The company positions its platform as offering flexibility, control, and cost efficiency for generative AI across inference, training, and compute workloads, as adoption of AI infrastructure continues to accelerate across industries.