The Together AI Series C round, announced on Wednesday, handed the AI neocloud $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $1.3 billion and cementing its position as one of the more heavily capitalised players in the open-source AI infrastructure market, according to Quartz.
Aramco Ventures led the round, with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, SentinelOne’s S Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and others, Reuters reported.
From $3.3bn to $8.3bn in Sixteen Months
Together AI’s previous round, a $305 million Series B led by General Catalyst and Prosperity7 Ventures, the venture arm of Aramco, came in at a $3.3 billion valuation about 16 months ago. That round was announced with plans for a large-scale deployment of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs as part of an expansion of its AI Acceleration Cloud, according to Together AI’s own Series B press release.
Before that, the company had raised a $102.5 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with Nvidia and Emergence Capital among the participants, back in 2023. Aramco’s return for the Series C, this time through its parent Aramco Ventures umbrella rather than Prosperity7 alone, signals the Saudi energy giant is doubling down on compute infrastructure as a long-term bet.
The new capital will fund an ambitious expansion: Together AI plans to grow its computing capacity approximately 50-fold over the next five years, a scale-up that frames the raise as something considerably more than a balance-sheet top-up.
Together AI Series C Reflects a Broader Shift Toward Open-Source Models
The fundraise is underpinned by a business argument that has gained traction across enterprise AI buyers. Companies are increasingly reaching for capable, far cheaper open-source models rather than paying token premiums on closed frontier systems for every workload they run. Together AI says that shift has tripled open-source model usage across the industry in the past year, citing research from AI gateway OpenRouter.
The company’s platform supports more than 200 open-source models, including DeepSeek-R1 and Meta’s Llama, spanning training, fine-tuning, inference, and synthetic data generation. CEO Vipul Ved Prakash has described Together AI as ‘one of the largest producers of AI tokens in the world’, according to The Next Web.
Annual bookings stood at over $1.15 billion as of the company’s last quarter, and Together AI counts thousands of paying customers, naming Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon among them.
There were early signals that a large round was coming. The Information reported in March that the company was seeking $1 billion in funding, but at a $7.5 billion valuation. The round that closed takes less capital at a higher valuation per dollar raised, suggesting Together AI found terms it preferred over what it had been pursuing in the spring.
A Hot Sector, and Intensifying Competition for Capital
Together AI is not alone in attracting large cheques. Upscale AI closed a Series A and an A extension totalling $500 million at a $2 billion valuation last month. TensorWave, which focuses on GPU clusters built around AMD chips rather than Nvidia, raised a $350 million Series B at a $1.55 billion valuation in the same period. Neoclouds, broadly defined as companies providing AI-specific hardware, often in the form of GPU clusters, and the surrounding infrastructure tools, have become a preferred destination for venture capital as demand for AI compute outpaces what hyperscalers alone can supply.
Together AI was co-founded by Vipul Ved Prakash, who previously sold social media search platform Topsy to Apple in 2013 for a reported $200 million or more. His co-founders are Percy Liang, a Stanford professor, and Ce Zhang, an associate professor affiliated with ETH Zürich and the University of Chicago.
Aramco’s stated aim for the partnership is scaling compute and capacity globally. Whether Together AI can deploy that 50-fold infrastructure expansion on schedule, and whether enterprise demand for open-source inference holds its current trajectory, will determine whether today’s $8.3 billion figure looks prescient or merely bold when the next fundraising window opens.
