Together Open Source Generative AI Cloud Player Raises $102.5 Million

Together AI has massive Series A for Open-Source Generative AI in the Cloud

Dec 02, 2023

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Nvidia-Backed Startup Together AI Raises $102.5 Million - Decrypt

Hey Everyone,

After a massive raise in France for an “OpenAI of Europe” candidate called Kyutai, open-source funding remains hot in December, 2023.

In what was a surprise to me, in a massive Series A, Together AI, on November 29th, 2023 said it has closed on an impressive $102.5 million Series A funding round to build the open-source infrastructure for generative AI model development.

The fastest cloud platform for building and running generative AI. - Together.

They are backed by Nvidia and raised Seed funding in May, 2023 led by Lux Capital.

Who are in it Together?

American venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins led the $102.5 million investment with participation from NVIDIA and Emergence Capital.

Lex Capital
Kleiner Perkins
Nvidia
Emergence Capital

Who else participated in the Seed Round?

In addition to Lex Capital, Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Robot Ventures, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures and SCB 10x. Several high-profile angel investors were also involved, including Scott Banister, one of the co-founders of PayPal, and Jeff Hammerbacher, a Cloudera founding employee.

Kleiner Perkins gets a board seat. Together said Kleiner Perkins partner Bucky Moore (see LinkedIn) will join the Together board as a stipulation of their investment.

Together AI’s CEO is Vipul Ved Prakash, formerly a director at Apple according to his LinkedIn.

The Series A is markedly over 5x over its Seed round, which really raised my eyebrows here.

Others joining the Series A investment include NEA, Prosperity 7, Greycroft, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, Definition Capital, and Long Journey Ventures. So Lux Capital doubled up on this and even Nvidia got in on it. Nvidia was most recently in in Twelve Labs and have made some of the smartest bets in Generative A.I. in all of 2023 that I have seen. And I’ve been studying them pretty closely.

“We care a lot about price performance, so the services we provide for our inference servers are six times cheaper than Open AI’s, and our training services are four times cheaper than AWS,” Prakash noted.

Claims 6x cheaper than OpenAI, which would not surprise me.

A Proven Founder

Vipul co-founded Together, launched in June 2022, with Ce Zhang, Chris Re and Percy Liang. Prakash previously founded social media search platform Topsy, which was acquired in 2013 by Apple, where he later became a senior director.

When founders have a history of exits, they typically can get larger rounds on their next project and Generative AI open-AI is a red hot space even if startups coming out of stealth have slowed down a touch as we head into the end of 2023, which has been a startling year for Generative AI funding.