Together AI Raises $800M at $8.3B Valuation: Open-Source AI Infrastructure Is Now Easier to Fund Than Model Companies
No proprietary models, no consumer API — just infrastructure for open-source models. Together AI just raised more money than most model companies.
Three Key Takeaways
Together AI announced an $800 million Series C on July 1 at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Saudi Aramco's venture arm Aramco Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, and SE Ventures. The valuation is up 2.5x from $3.3 billion in February 2025 and nearly 7x from $1.25 billion in March 2024.
The commercial traction is striking. Annualized bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter, while industry-wide open-source model usage tripled over the past 12 months. Together AI's core business is providing enterprises a platform to train and deploy open-source models — DeepSeek, MiniMax, Kimi — at lower cost than closed-source alternatives from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The capital is going into compute, not features. Together AI says the funding will expand its product line and computing infrastructure, projecting a roughly 50x increase in compute capacity over the next five years. That number signals it's not building a SaaS product — it's constructing an AI-native compute network to compete with public clouds.
WangDou's Take
In 2024 people were still debating whether open-source models could be monetized. In 2026, Together AI's annualized bookings hit $1.15 billion — more revenue than many closed-source model companies. The logic is simple: enterprises don't want to be locked into any single model vendor, open-source gives them the freedom to swap models without swapping plumbing, and Together AI is the plumbing. The Aramco Ventures lead is worth savoring too: an oil-state sovereign fund investing in AI compute infrastructure is the same playbook they ran 50 years ago with refineries — don't bet on which well produces oil, bet on "everyone who produces oil has to come through us."
Source: TechCrunch · BusinessWire