Unveiling TogetherAI: Revolutionizing AI for Everyone

San Francisco-based TogetherAI is making waves with its mission to democratize AI through an open-source cloud platform, backed by significant investments totaling $135 million. Let's dive into the key aspects that have stirred excitement in the tech community.

Funding Triumph

• Recently secured a substantial $102.5 million in a Series A investment from notable backers like NVIDIA, Kleiner Perkins, and Emergence Capital.
• Previous seed funding of $32.5 million, including contributions from Lux Capital, brought its valuation to an impressive $200 million.

AI Democratization Vision

• CEO Vipul Ved Prakash emphasizes the future of AI lies in open source, becoming a major force in how organizations implement generative AI.

Leading Product: Forge

• Forge, Together AI's flagship product, contributes 90% of the company's revenue.
• Launched in June, Forge offers a comprehensive solution, providing startups with computing resources and model training software in a single package.

Economic Advantage

• Forge's cost-effectiveness stands out, offering access to Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips at 20% of the cost compared to major cloud providers.
• Positioned as a strong competitor, potentially surpassing Nvidia’s own GPU cloud service.

Robust Infrastructure

• Boasts a powerful computing infrastructure, scaling up to a remarkable 20 exaflops across multiple data centers in the US and EU.
• Collaborates with AI cloud leaders like Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, tailored for high-performance AI applications.

Diverse Open-Source Models

• Success fueled by a diverse repository of open-source models, including Llama 2, Stable Diffusion, and the popular RedPajama.
• RedPajama stands out on model hub Hugging Face, with its 2.8 billion parameter version downloaded nearly 20,000 times last month.

Industry-Leading Performance

• Positioned alongside high-profile startups CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, and Foundry Technologies.
• Thriving amidst the ongoing GPU shortage, collectively raising billions to meet the demand.

Core Research Contributions

• Commitment to core research evident in groundbreaking efforts like the RedPajama-V2 dataset, the largest open dataset with 30 trillion tokens for training Language Models (LLMs).
• Unveiled FlashAttention v2, a pivotal innovation used by leading entities such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral.

Stellar Founding Team

• Boasts a distinguished lineup of founders, including Stanford professor Percy Liang, SambaNova Systems co-founder Chris Ré, and former Apple executive Vipul Ved Prakash as CEO.

Decentralized Systems Advocacy

• Aligned with the ethos of championing open and decentralized systems, mirroring the success trajectory of MosaicML, acquired for $1.3 billion by Databricks.

The Future for TogetherAI

• With a potential valuation trajectory mirroring MosaicML, Together AI could soar to a remarkable $650 million valuation.

In essence, TogetherAI's strategic positioning, economic advantages, and commitment to open-source innovation have made it a noteworthy player in the AI landscape, garnering attention from investors and the tech community alike.