The Salesforce Tower New York building is pictured in Manhattan in New York City, U.S., April 14, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
(Reuters) -Nvidia-backed Together AI said on Wednesday it has raised $106 million in a new funding round, doubling its valuation since last fall as investors rushed to back startups capitalizing on the generative AI boom.
Led by Salesforce Ventures, the funding valued Together AI at $1.25 billion. Other investors in the round included Coatue Management and existing investors such as Lux Capital and Emergence Capital.
Founded in 2022, Together AI quickly gained popularity as it offers access to Nvidia's sought-after graphics processing units (GPUs). Now it's trying to expand to a platform that helps developers to build or customize their open source AI models.
Customers "come for the GPUs, but stay for the workflow services and research," said Rob Keith, managing director at Salesforce Ventures who led the investment.
The new funding will be used to lease more computing power from cloud providers and for hiring researchers to build new model architecture, according to Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO at Together AI, who added the startup now has 45,000 registered users from AI startups and multinational enterprises.
"We are really becoming one of the default places if you want to use open models or customized models, and deploy them for large scale applications," said Prakash.
Together AI in November raised $102.5 million in a series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins at over $500 million, with participation from Nvidia.
Investments in AI startups have accelerated since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, as investors bet on firms that can benefit from the adoption of the technology and might challenge industry leaders.
(Reporting by Krystal Hu in San Francisco and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore and David Gregorio)
