NVIDIA Backs Startup to Give Companies Place to Build Generative AI

The Gist

NVIDIA the investor. The GPU giant was part of a funding round for its new ~40-person partner.
Open-source AI has a rising name. Together AI launched months ago, and it has caught the attention of the open-source AI community and many VCs.
There are billions to be had. Big tech is looking for and acquiring young companies that enable AI software development.

SAN FRANCISCO — The leading AI chip maker NVIDIA is getting behind an open-source AI startup that launched this summer.

Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA was an investor in the $102.5-million Series A financing round by San Francisco-based Together AI, according to a blog post this week by the startup’s Co-Founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash.

The AI Tech

Together AI’s go-to-market messaging is to help companies avoid vendor “lock in” and build their generative AI models on its open-source AI cloud platform, Prakash says.

The company believes generative AI is a platform technology and a “new operating system” for applications.

Prakash says the startup plans to use the capital to “significantly accelerate” its aim to create the “fastest” cloud platform for generative AI applications.

The startup’s AI inference API offering combines over 100 chat, language, image and code models under a token-based subscription model, according to its website. Its AI compute offering gives companies access to private GPU clusters, including ones by NVIDIA, and network infrastructure, which Prakash says is “growing to 20 exaflops” and includes multiple data centers in the U.S. and Europe.

NVIDIA as well as Meta are named as two of the company's several partners.

On the research side, Together AI’s team has shared several projects with the open-source AI community, such as its RedPajama-V2 data set, with 30 trillion tokens, for training large language models (LLMs). In the last month, Prakash says the model was downloaded 1.2 million times.

Prakash appears to summarize his open-source philosophy in this recent post at X:

A generation of humanity created the corpus (web) that led to the fantastic AI models of today and the only correct (and moral) answer is that AGI is a public good. Open source models are curiosities to some, relegated to sub-frontier by others, but they are more important than…
— Vipul Ved Prakash (@vipulved) November 21, 2023

Cloud-Like 'Shift'

One venture capital firm participated in the financing round after analyzing corporate spending trend toward generative AI.

“Emergence invested early in the enterprise shift to cloud applications, dating back to 2002 with our early investment in Salesforce,” says Joseph Floyd, general partner at San Francisco-based Emergence Capital, in the post.

“We see a similar shift today where enterprises are rapidly investing in generative AI.”

The firm believes in Together AI as enterprises “look to control their proprietary IP while pushing their generative AI investments from prototype into production,” Floyd says.

Emergence Capital’s investment portfolio also includes Zoom, Box and Yammer, according to its website.

A Tight Team

Together AI opened in June and has roughly 40 people associated with the company, according to LinkedIn. Many of them are located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The startup's other founders include CTO Ce Zhang, Chris Re and Percy Liang. Prior to Together AI, Prakash was the founder, CEO and CTO of the social media search and analytics company Topsy, which was acquired by Apple, according to his LinkedIn profile. At Apple, part of his work included "efforts" on AI.

The company is currently hiring for several roles in the AI domain — such as for GPU programming, the cloud, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision — and in contrast, a single sales role, according to its website.

Other Investors

The financing round was also led by Kleiner Perkins and included NEA, Prosperity 7, Greycroft and 137 Ventures as well as the startup’s seed investors: Lux Capital, Definition Capital, Long Journey Ventures, SCB10x, SV Angel, Factory and Scott Banister.

Previously, Together AI announced in May it raised $20 million in seed funding.

Players in the Open-Source AI Market

Together AI is facing a niche group of brands serving various aspects of the open-source AI market, such as the generative AI development platform H20.ai, the ML development platform ClearML and Google’s ML development platform TensorFlow.

The market research firm CB Insights maps over 70 notable vendors in the open-source AI development ecosystem by category, from the ML collaboration platform Hugging Face to the generative AI development platform MosaicML — which Databricks announced this summer it is acquiring for $1.3 billion.

Last month, the AI chip maker AMD announced it is acquiring the open-source AI software company Nod.ai for an undisclosed amount.