Key Points
- Together AI raised an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion valuation on July 1.
- Aramco Ventures led the round, with Nvidia, Vista Equity, and General Catalyst joining.
- The company reports annual bookings above $1.15 billion; customers include Cursor and Cognition.
- The valuation more than doubled from $3.3 billion at its early-2025 Series B.
Together AI closed an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation, the San Francisco company announced July 1. The round was led by Aramco Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia's state oil company, with Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, and Pegatron among the participants.
Founded in 2022 by Vipul Ved Prakash, Percy Liang, and Ce Zhang, Together AI is an "AI cloud" — it rents out Nvidia GPU clusters and specialized infrastructure for companies to train and run open-source models rather than the closed systems sold by OpenAI and Anthropic. The company says annual bookings topped $1.15 billion in its most recent quarter, with customers including coding startup Cursor — which SpaceX agreed to acquire for $60 billion — along with Cognition and Decagon. The raise more than doubles the $3.3 billion valuation Together set at its $305 million Series B in early 2025.
The lead check is the signal. Aramco Ventures backing a U.S. AI-infrastructure company is sovereign oil capital rotating directly into the compute layer of the AI economy, a pattern that has quietly repriced the "picks and shovels" tier faster than the model labs themselves. Money keeps flowing to the operating layer — the GPUs, the inference, the hosting — even as public attention fixates on the frontier models, and it is doing so partly on a bet that open-source models are where enterprise demand ultimately concentrates.
It is the latest data point in an AI capital cycle that keeps minting valuations. The training layer is drawing the same money: Prime Intellect raised a $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation for its enterprise AI training platform days later. Rivals are chasing the same silicon independence — Anthropic is in talks with Samsung to develop a custom AI chip — while the money finds the public markets, from Bending Spoons' $1.6 billion Nasdaq IPO to the confidential filings of the frontier labs. Together AI is betting that the money in AI ends up with whoever supplies the compute, not only whoever builds the models.
The pattern is not confined to U.S. infrastructure. Weeks later, Alibaba led an extension bringing AI video startup AIsphere's Series C to $439 million at a valuation above $2 billion, as China's internet conglomerates chase the same capability layer.
Source: TechCrunch.
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