Together AI, an emerging startup in the realm of generative AI, has recently closed a significant Series A funding round of $102.5 million led by Kleiner Perkins, along with contributions from Nvidia and Emergence Capital. This substantial influx of capital is earmarked for expanding the company’s cloud platform, designed to empower developers in constructing both open source and custom AI models. Vipul Ved Prakash, the CEO and co-founder, asserts that the focus is on creating a generative AI ecosystem free from vendor lock-in.
The company, initiated in June 2022 by Prakash alongside Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang, envisions an AI landscape that embraces open source models to facilitate their integration into various applications. Their cloud platform offers scalable compute capabilities at competitive prices compared to major vendors like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure. Together’s infrastructure optimization, employing thousands of GPUs across secure facilities, drives significant reductions in operating costs for interactive inference workloads on large models.
Operating across data centres in the U.S. and EU, including collaborations with partners Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, Together’s cloud delivers a substantial compute power of around 20 exaflops. Notable customers, such as NexusFlow, Voyage AI, and Cartesia, leverage Together’s platform and APIs for model deployment, with Pika Labs, another entity that recently secured $55 million, utilising Together’s GPU clusters for training text-to-video models.
Prakash emphasises the company’s commitment to offering superior economics through customised infrastructure, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate open source models or create their own models via pre-training or fine-tuning. Moreover, Together extends its services through “Custom Models,” allowing clients to bring their data onto the platform for collaborative model design, construction, and testing by the company’s experts.
Furthermore, the company places a significant emphasis on open source AI research, spearheading projects like RedPajama, focused on developing open source generative AI models akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, along with other ventures like GPT-JT and OpenChatKit.
While generative AI continues to attract substantial investments—projected to skyrocket from $16 billion in 2023 to a staggering $143 billion by 2027—companies in this domain face uncertainties. As exemplified by Stability AI, despite once being a VC favourite, some struggle to materialise profits and maintain financial stability, leading to potential restructurings or sales.
While the generative AI landscape is flourishing, it is not without challenges. Instances such as Stability AI, once a VC darling, exploring a sale due to financial struggles highlight the importance of navigating the sector’s complexities. Nevertheless, Together’s substantial funding positions it favourably to continue driving innovation and expanding its footprint in the evolving generative AI market.
