Generative artificial intelligence startups have been raking in billions of dollars in investors money this year, and the latest one to do so is a company called Together Computer Inc.

Better known as Together AI, it said today it has closed on an impressive $102.5 million Series A funding round to build the open-source infrastructure for generative AI model development. It says its comprehensive cloud-based platform will be used by developers anywhere to create open and customizable AI models.

Today’s round was led by Kleiner Perkins and saw participation from a host of others, including Nvidia Corp., Emergence Capital, NEA, Prosperity 7, Greycroft and 137 Ventures, plus seed investors Lux Capital, Definition Capital, Long Journey Ventures, SCB10x, SV Angel, Factory and Scott Banister.

Together AI was founded by its Chief Executive Officer Vipul Ved Prakash in June 2022, together with co-founders Ce Zhang, Percy Liang and Chris Re. Prakash was previously the founder of the social media search company Topsy Labs Inc., and later joined Apple Inc. after that company was acquired by the iPhone maker in 2013.

Together, the co-founders are looking to create an open-source infrastructure platform, plus models and services that any organization will be able to use to embed AI in their applications. Together’s cloud platform facilitates the training, fine-tuning and running in production of AI models. It says its infrastructure can scale at lower prices than offered by cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC.

In a blog post, Prakash said the startup has been able to achieve and offer significant cost reductions for large language models running interactive inference workloads. “We optimize down the stack, with thousands of GPUs located in multiple secure facilities, software for virtualization, scheduling and model optimizations that significantly bring down operating costs,” the CEO said.

The startup has already built a nascent web of data centers that span locations in the U.S. and in Europe. Its data centers are powered by servers from partners including Crusoe Energy Systems LLC and The Constant Co. LLC, better known as Vultr.

It claims that its infrastructure can offer more than 20 exaflops of compute power in total, with clusters ranging from just 16 graphics processing units to 2,048 at the upper end. Its customers include Ai startups such as Nexusflow.ai Inc. and Voyage.ai Inc.

Another of its major customers is Pika Labs Inc., a startup that closed on its own funding round of $55 million just this week. That company has developed its flagship text-to-video model on Together’s infrastructure, and says it’s now generating millions of videos each month for its early access users.

Vipul said companies can use Together’s platform to quickly and easily integrate leading open-source LLMs, or alternatively their own models, within their applications. It offers pretraining and fine-tuning, he added. “Our customers choose to bring their generative AI workloads to Together owing to our industry-leading performance and reliability, while still having comfort that they own the result of their investment in AI and are always free to run their model on any platform,” he added.

Alongside its cloud infrastructure, Together also offers something called Custom Models, which is actually a consulting service. It said it has experts on hand to help companies design and build customized AI models for specific workloads, trained on their own proprietary data, meaning they don’t need a whole lot of AI expertise to get started.

Open-source AI research is also an area of interest for Together. One of its most interesting projects is RedPajama, which is an initiative that’s developing a series of chat-based generative AI models that will rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In addition, the company has taken Meta Platforms Inc.’s open-source text generating model Llama 2 and created a customized version of it. Its other projects include OpenChatKit, which is another attempt to rival ChatGPT, plus GPT-JT, said to be a fork of the open-source GPT-J-6B model for analyzing text.

Prakash said the funds from today’s round will help Together to accelerate its goal of creating “the fastest cloud platform for generative AI applications.”

Venture capital firms have demonstrated a seemingly insatiable hunger for generative AI this year, with dozens of startups in the industry closing on megabucks funding rounds. The best-funded generative AI startup remains OpenAI, which has secured billions of dollars from Microsoft and other investors. The likes of AI21 Labs Inc., Anthropic PBC, Cohere Inc., Perplexity AI and Writer Inc. have also raised significant amounts of money this year.

A recent forecast from International Data Corp. suggests that generative AI is likely to attract as much as $143 billion in funding by 2027, but investors may want to avoid throwing too much caution to the wind. Earlier today, Bloomberg reported that another hot generative AI startup, Stability AI Ltd., best known for its image generation tools, is currently exploring a sale because of its failure to make money from its offerings.

Image: Together AI