Together – a company that will enable researchers, developers, and companies to leverage and improve artificial intelligence with an intuitive platform combining data, models, and computation – announced recently that it raised $20 million in funding. This funding round was led by Lux Capital.
The company has a goal of empowering innovation and creativity by providing leading open-source generative AI models and a cloud platform that makes AI accessible to anyone.
Factory, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, A Capital, Robot Ventures, Common Metal, Definition Capital, Susa Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, SCB 10x, Scott Banister, the co-founder of PayPal; Jeff Hammerbacher, the co-founder of Cloudera; Dawn Song, the co-founder of Oasis Labs, Alex Atallah, the co-founder of OpenSea; MC Lader, the COO of Uniswap, Lip-Bu Tan, the founder of Cadence Systems; Jakob Uszkoreit, the co-inventor of the Transformer architecture, as well as angel investors Marc Bhargava, Jennifer Campbell, Chafic Kazoun, Sabrina Hahn, SongYee Yoon, Chase Lochmiller, Yi Sun, Dave Eisenberg, Panos Madamopoulos-Moraris, and Zach Frankel also joined this round.
“Since our founding, we have brought together an incredible team of researchers, engineers, and AI practitioners; created collaborations with decentralized infrastructure providers, open-source groups, and both academic and corporate research labs to further this mission. We have released several projects that have garnered support from hundreds of thousands of AI developers including GPT-JT, OpenChatKit and RedPajama. This is just the beginning. Our aim is to help create open models that outrival closed models and establish open-source as the default way to incorporate AI,” said Vipul Ved Prakash, Co-founder and CEO. “Leveraging research in distributed optimization, we have built a specialized cloud platform for large models that efficiently scales training and inference. In the coming months we plan to open up access to this platform, enabling rapid customization and coupling of foundation models with production tasks. Open models will give developers and organizations greater ability to understand, inspect, and utilize AI, without vendor lock-in and with strong privacy protections.”
