Cloud Platform Startup Together AI Raises $102.5 Million to Fuel Open Source AI
I spoke with Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash
Together AI, a startup that’s helping companies pre-train and fine-tune open source foundation models more efficiently on costly graphics chips, is announcing its sprawling $102.5 million Series A round.
The team, led by serial startup founder and former Apple executive Vipul Ved Prakash is chock full of senior artificial intelligence researchers. The company’s three other co-founders are experienced artificial intelligence academics. The company’s chief scientist, Tri Dao, created FlashAttention, an open-source library, that’s become a key tool to train foundation models more efficiently.
Kleiner Perkins is leading the funding round, with partner Bucky Moore taking a board seat. Nvidia and Emergence Capital are also major contributors to the funding round.
Together has been one of the startups with louder and louder whispers that it could end up being a key player in the open source resistance to big, closed foundation model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Together is helping companies more efficiently take advantage of the power of expensive graphics chips like the Nvidia H100s. It’s a full-stack cloud platform for open source AI.
Companies like Pika Labs (which announced $55 million in funding yesterday), Nexusflow, Voyage AI, and Cartesia all use Together AI’s cloud platform. And Crusoe, the startup that’s using stranded energy to power costly AI chips, is a partner, along with Nvidia and cloud infrastructure provider Vultr.