Together AI, Supported by Nvidia, Secures $102.5 Million in Funding
Together, the open-source cloud AI startup, secures $102.5 million in funding, with NVIDIA's involvement playing a crucial role.
Together, an open-source cloud AI startup, recently announced a significant funding milestone, securing $102.5 million in Series A investments, including a contribution from tech giant NVIDIA. The funding, led by American venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins with participation from NVIDIA and Emergence Capital, was announced on Wednesday. As part of the investment, Kleiner Perkins partner Bucky Moore will join Together's board.
The company's focus on deep research in optimizing training and inference for large generative models has been a key factor in attracting investor interest. This is evidenced by their recent launch of an inference engine, which features a speed three times faster than most competitors.
Together's collaboration with NVIDIA, a leading company in AI and a specialist in graphics cards, has been crucial. NVIDIA's involvement in AI has been significant, particularly in 2023, with various updates and upgrades enhancing computing power.
The Series A funding round also saw participation from NEA, Prosperity 7, Greycroft, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, Definition Capital, and Long Journey Ventures. This follows Together's $20 million seed funding raised in May, as reported by Venture Beat.
Together's CEO Vipul Ved Prakash emphasized the company's commitment to price performance, claiming their services are significantly more cost-effective than those of competitors like Open AI and AWS.
The investment will be channeled towards enhancing Together's cloud platform for AI applications, furthering research and development, contributing to open-source AI, and improving infrastructure. The company takes a privacy-focused approach, giving developers control over data sharing and storage on the platform.
Ved Prakash highlighted NVIDIA's pivotal role in meeting Together's computing needs. At its Supercomputing 2023 event, NVIDIA unveiled its upgraded Grace Hopper Superchips and announced developments in quantum processing units (QPUs).
Together AI, which launched in June 2022 and is based in San Francisco, is committed to the future of generative AI through open-source models. The team, comprising industry veterans and academics, believes in the advantages of open-source models, including accuracy, ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and performance. They foresee open source playing a major role in how organizations implement generative AI.
