Together AI Raises $800M at an $8.3B Valuation

Together AI, the cloud platform that lets companies train and serve open-source AI models, has closed an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation — more than doubling the $3.3 billion it was worth in early 2025. The round, reported on July 1, was led by Aramco Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence, Salesforce Ventures, March Capital, Pegatron VC and SentinelOne. It brings the four-year-old company's total raised to more than $978 million.

Together's pitch is to be the neutral home for open models. Rather than pushing a single in-house system, it hosts and fine-tunes open-weight releases — including DeepSeek, MiniMax and Kimi — on its own GPU fleet, and sells training and inference at prices it says undercut the proprietary offerings from the big clouds. As frontier open models close the gap with closed ones, that bet has turned into a real business: the company reports $1.15 billion in annual bookings and counts fast-growing AI-native firms such as Cursor, Cognition and Decagon among its customers.

The investor list is as telling as the number. Nvidia's participation ties Together more tightly to the chips its whole platform runs on, while Aramco Ventures leading the round signals that Gulf capital is now chasing the "picks and shovels" of the AI build-out, not just the headline model labs. It lands in a week thick with infrastructure money — days after Baseten's $1.5 billion Series F and alongside a wave of raises aimed squarely at the plumbing beneath the models rather than the apps on top.

Chief executive Vipul Ved Prakash framed the raise as a fight over who controls access to AI. The future, he argued, depends on enabling "millions of developers and businesses" to build on models they can inspect and own, rather than concentrating capability inside a handful of hyperscale clouds. That is the same open-versus-closed argument animating other 2026 upstarts — including privacy-first aggregator Venice AI — and Together is now among the best-funded companies making it.

The capital will go toward expanding low-cost inference and hardening the platform as a foundational layer for enterprise AI. The wager is straightforward: if open models keep improving, the value migrates from owning the model to running it cheaply, reliably and at scale — and Together wants to be the default place that happens.