Together AI raised $800M in Series C to develop open-source AI

Together AI announced on July 1, 2026 the closing of a Series C round of $800 million — one of the largest in the history of AI infrastructure companies betting on open models.

Who invested and where the money will go

The round included Aramco Ventures, NVIDIA, Vista Equity, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Schneider Electric, Pegatron, Salesforce Ventures, March Capital, DTCP Growth, Lux Capital, Geodesic, PSP Partners and others. In addition to equity capital, new investors have reserved over 500 MW of computing capacity — independently of the main round, to support infrastructure growth in the coming years.

Key facts:

• Amount raised — $800 million, closing date — July 1, 2026
• Lead investors — NVIDIA, Aramco Ventures, Vista Equity, General Catalyst
• Additional commitments — over 500 MW of computing capacity
• Platform customers — Cognition, Decagon, Eleven Labs, Cursor, Suno

Together AI was founded four years ago with the belief that generative AI should be open and accessible to a broad community of developers, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few corporations. By mid-2026, the company has grown into a full-fledged AI platform with a customer base of thousands of organizations.

Why don't proprietary models withstand production workloads?

Together AI points to a fundamental economic contradiction: when AI transitions from prototype to real product, inference costs with proprietary models often grow faster than budgets. Companies are forced to "ration intelligence" precisely when agents write code, process customer requests, analyze documents, and automate entire workflows.

Open-source models — DeepSeek, Nemotron, MiniMax, Kimi, GLM — according to Together AI, have closed the quality gap with proprietary counterparts, while leaving developers the freedom to fine-tune for specific tasks. Platform customers save 6 to 20 times compared to closed LLMs. Decagon, for example, reduced inference costs by six times after switching to Together AI.

"The economics of production AI is determined not only by models, but

by the entire stack: kernels, compilers, inference systems, hardware and software load, and the software that ties it all together," — Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO Together AI.

What the company is developing

Together AI positions itself as a research company where fundamental development goes directly to production. Over recent quarters, the team released FlashAttention-4 for NVIDIA Blackwell, Together Megakernel and together.compile — kernel-level optimization tools for industrial workloads. Post-training APIs have been expanded with support for tool calling, reasoning, and multimodal models. According to management, Together AI has become one of the world's largest producers of AI tokens.

What this means

An $800 million round with participation from NVIDIA, Aramco Ventures and Schneider Electric means: major industrial capital is betting on open-source infrastructure as the production standard for AI agents — and this is pressure that proprietary model vendors will feel.

Frequently asked questions

Who are Together AI's customers and how much do they save?

Customers include Cognition, Decagon, Eleven Labs, Cursor and Suno. Decagon reduced inference spending by six times after switching to the platform; on average, companies save 6 to 20 times compared to closed LLMs.

What do 500 MW of capacity in the deal mean?

These are computing resources that new investors have committed to provide independently of equity capital — as a separate tranche to support Together AI's expected infrastructure growth.