Startups

Together AI raises $800M at $8.3B valuation as open-source inference bookings top $1.15B

Aramco Ventures led the Series C, with Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Vista and General Catalyst joining a round that more than doubles the neocloud's valuation in 16 months.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-07-08 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Taylor Vick — Rows of servers illuminated in a data center corridor

Together AI closed an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion valuation, led by Aramco Ventures, with Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Vista Equity, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Schneider Electric, Pegatron, March Capital, DTCP Growth, Lux Capital, Geodesic and PSP Partners joining. The round more than doubles the company’s $3.3 billion Series B mark from just 16 months ago, when it raised $305 million, and it lands well above the $1 billion at a $7.5 billion valuation the company was reportedly targeting when The Information first flagged the process in March. In March 2024, the same business was valued at $1.25 billion.

The compression of that timeline is the story. Neocloud economics in 2026 are being priced off bookings velocity, not multiples on trailing revenue, and Together’s disclosure that annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter is the number underwriting the step-up. Customers named in the announcement, Cursor, Cognition and Decagon, are exactly the code-generation and agent workloads currently absorbing inference capacity faster than hyperscalers can provision it.

Alongside the equity, Together secured 500 MW of compute capacity commitments and told investors it expects a roughly 50-fold expansion of computing capacity and infrastructure over the next five years. That’s why Schneider Electric and Pegatron are on the cap table. Power and racks are the constraint now, not term sheets.

“We’re building the AI Acceleration Cloud so every developer and enterprise can run frontier open models with the performance and economics they need,” said Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO of Together AI, framing the platform’s bet on open weights like DeepSeek and MiniMax as an alternative to closed-model API dependence.

Joe Floyd of Emergence Capital cast the thesis in market terms: “Together AI is defining the category of AI inference infrastructure.”

The category is getting crowded. In the same week Crunchbase tracked, Together’s raise was only the second-largest U.S. round, behind Joulent’s $1.75 billion strategic financing in Houston. Upscale AI extended its Series A to $500 million at $2 billion, and TensorWave, betting on AMD GPU clusters, raised $350 million at $1.55 billion. Reuters had detailed the Series B mechanics last year; the Series C simply confirms what the bookings line already implied. Open-source inference is a durable business, and the capital markets have decided the neocloud tier is where it gets built.

Sources