Together, a Menlo Park, CA-based startup focused on developing open-source generative AI models and services that enable organizations to incorporate AI into their production applications, has raised $20 million in a seed funding round.

The round was led by Lux Capital, with participation from Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Robot Ventures, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and SCB 10x.

Notable angel investors, including Scott Banister (co-founder of PayPal) and Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera founding employee), also participated in the round. The seed funding will use to expand Together's team, research, product, and infrastructure.

The startup is building a cloud platform for running, training, and fine-tuning open-source models that the co-founder's claim will offer scalable computing at “dramatically lower” prices than the dominant vendors (e.g., Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure).

One of Together's initial projects is RedPajama, which aims to foster a set of open-source generative models, including chat models similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. RedPajama is a collaborative effort involving Together, the MILA Québec AI Institute, CRFM, and ETH's data science lab, DS3Lab.

Together has also developed GPT-JT, a fork of the open-source text-generating model GPT-J-6B, and OpenChatKit, an alternative to ChatGPT.

Company: Together Computer Inc.

Raised: $20.0M

Round: Seed Round 

Funding Month: May 2023

Lead Investors: Lux Capital

Additional Investors: Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Robot Ventures, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and SCB 10x

Company Website: https://www.together.xyz/

Software Category: Open-source AI and Cloud Platform

About the Company: Founded by Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang, Together is an operator of a technology services platform designed to provide a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence. The company's platform is involved in building large, open models that are easy to use and are open source, enabling researchers, developers, and companies to leverage and improve artificial intelligence with an intuitive data, model, and computation platform. Together believes that generative models are consequential for society, and they are dedicated to creating a vibrant open ecosystem that allows individuals and enterprises to participate. Together’s mission is to empower innovation and creativity by providing leading open-source generative AI models and a cloud platform that makes AI accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/15/together-raises-20m-to-build-open-source-generative-ai-models/