Startups

Together AI raises $800M Series C at $8.3B valuation, doubling in 16 months

Aramco Ventures led the July 1 round for the San Francisco neocloud, which also secured commitments for more than 500 MW of compute capacity to scale open-source model inference.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-07-06 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Taylor Vick — Rows of illuminated server racks inside a data center

Together AI closed an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation on July 1, led by Aramco Ventures. That’s more than double the $3.3 billion mark the San Francisco neocloud carried at its Series B roughly 16 months ago, when it raised $305 million, and well above the $1.25 billion valuation on the books in early 2024.

The round also cleared the terms The Information reported in March, when the company was said to be seeking $1 billion at $7.5 billion. It didn’t close there. It closed higher, with a longer investor list, and with the strategic optionality that a Saudi anchor implies.

The syndicate reads like a who’s-who of AI-infrastructure exposure: Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia (now backing the company across three consecutive rounds), March Capital, Pegatron, Salesforce Ventures, Lux Capital, DTCP Growth, Geodesic, PSP Partners, plus corporate venture arms SE Ventures (Schneider Electric) and S Ventures (SentinelOne).

Alongside the equity, Together said it “secured commitments for over 500 MW of compute capacity to be capitalized independently by our new investors to support our expected compute growth in the coming years.” The company expects a roughly 50-fold expansion of its infrastructure footprint over the next five years. Separating the power buildout from the equity raise is the tell here. Neoclouds are increasingly financed like utilities: balance-sheet compute funded off balance sheet, revenue underwritten before the racks arrive.

CEO Vipul Ved Prakash framed the thesis in familiar open-ecosystem terms. “History shows that the biggest technology shifts are won by open ecosystems that make innovation cheaper, faster and available to everyone,” he said. Together’s platform hosts DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Kimi, positioning it as the inference layer for models the U.S. hyperscalers won’t touch directly.

Aramco’s Meshal Almashari described the investment as “a long-term conviction in artificial intelligence infrastructure and the platforms that will enable AI deployment at scale.” Crunchbase ranked the round the second-largest U.S. venture deal of the week, behind Houston energy startup Joulent’s $1.75 billion strategic financing. The adjacency is the story. Compute and power now clear the same capital markets.

Sources