Together AI raises $102.5m Series A

Together AI, a cloud-infrastructure company built around training and serving open-weight AI models, raised a $102.5 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with NVIDIA, Emergence Capital and NEA among the other participants. The company was co-founded in 2022 by Vipul Ved Prakash, a former Apple executive, together with academics Ce Zhang, Chris Ré and Percy Liang.

Together’s pitch was infrastructure for the “open” side of the model landscape: a cloud spanning US and EU datacentres, including capacity run through partners Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, offering training and inference for open-weight models rather than building a proprietary frontier model itself. TechCrunch reported customers by then included AI startups such as NexusFlow, Voyage AI and Pika Labs, building on open models rather than training their own from scratch; other reporting put the round’s valuation at roughly $500 million.

The raise landed the same week as unrelated open-weight news from DeepSeek and 01.AI, underlining that by late 2023 the open-model ecosystem had enough commercial activity — labs releasing weights, and separate companies building the infrastructure to run them — to support venture rounds on both sides. Together went on to raise substantially larger rounds in subsequent years as demand for open-model inference capacity grew.