The round also saw participation from lifecycle investment platform Coatue and Together AI's existing investors including Lux Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Emergence Capital, Definition Capital, Prosperity7 Ventures, NEA, Long Journey Ventures, Greycroft, Factory, Scott Banister, and SV Angel
Research-driven AI company Together AI secures $106m in a new financing round. (Credit: Brian Penny from Pixabay)
Together AI, a US-based research-driven artificial intelligence (AI) company, has secured $106m in a new financing round led by Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital arm of Salesforce.
The round also saw the involvement of lifecycle investment platform Coatue.
Apart from that, there was participation from Together AI’s existing investors including Lux Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Prosperity7 Ventures, Emergence Capital, NEA, Definition Capital, Greycroft, Long Journey Ventures, Scott Banister, Factory, and SV Angel.
Besides, industry experts including HuggingFace CEO Clem Delangue and PyTorch creator Soumith Chintala participated in the new financing round.
Salesforce Ventures managing partner Paul Drews said: “Drawing from our extensive experience and thematic work in the AI infrastructure realm and fostering collaborations with enterprise clients alongside the Salesforce Research team, it’s evident: companies are moving towards an open-source approach in AI adoption, often augmented by closed-source technologies.
“Together AI has emerged as a leading solution to meet this open-source demand, and we’re fully confident in the team’s ability to bring this ambitious vision to fruition.”
Together AI plans to utilise the capital for its continued expansion.
This comprises features designed to assist large enterprises by providing a platform for teams across the organisation to develop and deploy generative AI solutions effortlessly, efficiently, and securely, utilising both open-source and custom models.
The AI company also seeks to leverage the new funding to strengthen its compute capacity globally.
Established in 2022, Together AI provides users a platform for seamless development and deployment of open-source models, with the capability to transition them into enterprise-grade applications for production.
The firm aims to advance cutting-edge open-source generative AI. It has launched StripedHyena and Mamba models which are said to demonstrate a clear path for generative AI to move to more efficient architectures.
Together AI’s serverless application programming interfaces (APIs) for inference and fine-tuning are said to have more than 45,000 registered developers.
The company is integrated into AI application development frameworks including LangChain, Vercel, MongoDB, LlamaIndex, and EmbedChain.
Together AI co-founder and CEO Vipul Prakash said: “Generative AI is a new computing platform, and we aim to help developers everywhere build and deploy the next generation of applications.
“We’re honoured to be a part of building an open and collaborative future together with all of you!”