Last Updated: 4 July 2026
Together AI, the startup that helps businesses run open-source AI models at lower cost, has raised $800 million in a Series C round. The company, co-founded and led by CEO Vipul Ved Prakash, offers an alternative to expensive proprietary AI systems by letting customers train and deploy open models such as DeepSeek, Nemotron, MiniMax, and Kimi on its platform.
The funding arrives as AI costs become a growing concern. Companies that build products on top of AI are finding that the fees charged by proprietary model providers can consume most of their profit margin. Open-source models have closed much of the performance gap while staying far cheaper to operate, and usage of these models across the industry has tripled over the past twelve months.
The $800 million round values Together AI at $8.3 billion post-money. Aramco Ventures led the investment, with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, NVIDIA, March Capital, Pegatron, S Ventures (backed by SentinelOne), and other investors.
For a growing number of businesses, the math is straightforward. Running AI workloads on open-source models costs a fraction of what closed systems charge, and the results are often comparable. Together AI says its customers have reduced inference costs (the cost of running a trained model to produce results) by six to sixty times relative to closed-model pricing. Decagon, one of those customers, cut its inference spending sixfold after moving to Together AI's platform.
"The shift toward open source isn't a niche preference anymore, it's becoming the default for any company that wants to scale AI without losing its margin," said Joe Floyd, General Partner at Emergence Capital. "Together has the team, the infrastructure, and the customer base to lead that shift, and the growth speaks for itself."
Joe Floyd, General Partner at Emergence Capital
The company's annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter. It now counts thousands of paying customers, including AI companies such as Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon. According to McKinsey, nearly three-quarters of organizations expect to increase their use of open-source AI, which suggests the broader trend still has room to grow.
Most of the new capital will go toward two priorities: expanding the company's product offering and dramatically increasing its computing capacity. Together AI expects its infrastructure to grow roughly 50-fold over the next five years, a goal that requires heavy upfront spending on specialized hardware, particularly the graphics processing chips that power AI workloads.
"Building AI infrastructure over the next decade will be the biggest infrastructure project in human history. Together has built the platform that makes open source models genuinely usable at enterprise scale, and the team's ambition matches the scale of the opportunity in front of them. We're proud to partner with them, not just on this round but on scaling compute and capacity globally."
Abhishek Shukla, Managing Director of Prosperity7 Ventures US, Aramco Ventures
The bet is that demand for affordable AI computing will keep rising. If more companies shift workloads to open-source models, Together AI wants the infrastructure in place to handle that volume.
Together AI was founded in 2022 by Vipul Ved Prakash, Stanford professor Percy Liang, ETH Zürich and University of Chicago associate professor Ce Zhang, Stanford professor Chris Ré, and chief scientist Tri Dao. The company calls itself the "AI Native Cloud," combining open-source models with computing infrastructure and research focused on AI efficiency.
In practical terms, the company sits between businesses that need AI and the computing power required to run it. Instead of building their own data centers or paying premium fees to proprietary providers, customers use Together AI's platform to train and run open-source models. The company says it now serves over a million developers. Its engineering work focuses on extracting more performance from each chip, which is a key reason it can offer lower prices.
"History shows that the biggest technology shifts are won by open ecosystems that make innovation cheaper, faster and available to everyone. We believe AI will follow the same path."
Vipul Ved Prakash, co-founder and CEO of Together AI
This is not Together AI's first sizable raise. In February 2025, the company closed a $305 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation, led by General Catalyst. Before that, it raised a $102.5 million Series A in 2023 led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from NVIDIA and Emergence Capital. The new Series C brings total funding to roughly $1.3 billion.
Aramco Ventures led the latest round, with backing from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, NVIDIA, March Capital, Pegatron, and S Ventures, among others.
"Our investment in Together AI reflects our long-term conviction in artificial intelligence infrastructure and the platforms that will enable AI deployment at scale. It also demonstrates the strength of our multi-stage venturing platform supporting companies from early growth to late-stage scale-up as they evolve into global leaders."
Meshal Almashari, Executive Managing Director, Late-Stage Venturing Program, Aramco Ventures
