The current boom in AI funding showcases a stark increase from previous years, with AI startups raising over $42 billion in Q4 2024 alone, nearly doubling the previous quarter's record.

Recently, Together AI secured $102.5 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst and Prosperity7, valuing the company at $3.3 billion and attracting investment from notable players like Salesforce Ventures and NVIDIA.

Founded in 2022, Together AI has rapidly established itself as a significant player in the enterprise AI market by providing an open-source alternative to proprietary platforms.

Agentic AI is driving further demand for infrastructure, as workflows can lead to thousands of API calls per user request, increasing compute requirements.

The company specializes in a cloud platform that enables developers and researchers to train and deploy generative AI models, supporting over 200 open-source AI models including Meta's Llama and China's DeepSeek-R1.

The company claims superior performance metrics, serving the DeepSeek-R1 model at 85 tokens per second, significantly outperforming Azure's capacity of seven tokens per second.

Together AI's platform encompasses the entire AI lifecycle, offering capabilities for inference, training, fine-tuning, and synthetic data generation.

Despite the emergence of efficient models, the demand for AI computing infrastructure is on the rise, creating opportunities and challenges for Together AI amid competition from major cloud providers.

As Together AI scales its infrastructure, it faces the challenge of balancing rapid growth with maintaining the performance advantages that have contributed to its success.

To enhance support for agentic AI workloads, Together AI acquired CodeSandbox, allowing for faster execution of code in the cloud environment.

The funding will support ongoing research initiatives aimed at optimizing AI performance and efficiency, led by chief scientist Tri Dao.

Recent advancements include the integration of open source models like DeepSeek-R1 and Meta's Llama, which are positioned as competitive alternatives to proprietary AI solutions.