Open-source cloud AI startup Together AI recently attracted significant investment, securing $102.5 million in a Series A funding round. Key investors include technology giant NVIDIA. The announcement highlights the growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI).

In the announcement, co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash expressed the company’s vision.

At Together AI, we believe the future of AI is open source. So we are creating a comprehensive cloud platform to allow developers everywhere to build on open and custom AI models.

Together AI has shown a strong focus on research with their latest projects. They have introduced the RedPajama-V2 dataset, which is the biggest open dataset available, containing 30 trillion tokens for training language models. They’ve also developed FlashAttention v2, now used by top companies to create advanced language models.

A spokesperson from Together AI spoke to Decrypt about their research. They said the company has created a strong research team that works on making generative models better and faster. This work has led to some major publications and the creation of a new inference engine that is three times quicker than a lot of the ones available now.

The spokesperson also said that the investment will be used to make their cloud platform better for AI applications, to invest more in research and development, to help open-source AI projects, and to improve their overall infrastructure. Speaking about privacy, the spokesperson said:

By default, we don’t use any data from our customers or their users for training of models…And [customers] able to control whether or not they turn on or off the data storage.

Key Investors Rally Behind Together AI in Series A Funding Round

Leading the investment round was American venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, with NVIDIA and Emergence Capital also participating. As part of the investment, Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins will join the board of Together AI, bringing his expertise to the company’s strategic direction. This development is part of Together AI’s broader goal to build a comprehensive and fast cloud platform for generative AI applications.

Other investors in the Series A round include NEA, Prosperity 7, Greycroft, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, Definition Capital, and Long Journey Ventures. Earlier in May, it was reported by Venture Beat that Together had raised $20 million in initial seed funding.

Important Context

Founded in June 2022, Together AI, located in San Francisco, specializes in creating open-source AI cloud software. Its team includes experienced professionals from Apple, ETH Zurich, and scholars from prestigious institutions like Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and MIT.

Nvidia, the leading ai hardware and graphics card maker, has seen an outstanding year in 2023, marked by advancements in AI technology. The company is using its expertise in graphics processing to bring new ideas to AI, like deep learning and neural networks.

Nvidia’s contributions have been vital in creating new AI tools and applications, and its technology is now being used more widely across different fields, including gaming, self-driving cars, and healthcare. In fact, earlier this year, Nvidia reported a 101% increase in quarterly revenue compared to 2022, achieving $13.51 billion in the second quarter ending July 30.