Together AI raises $800M: open-source AI becomes a credible procurement strategy

Together AI, an inference platform specialised in open-source models, has closed an $800M Series C led by Aramco Ventures, valuing the company at $8.3B — more than double in 16 months. The company now exceeds $1B in annual revenue. This is no longer a niche bet: it is production infrastructure.

What Cardan-AI takes from this for enterprises: the economic credibility of the open-source stack is now market-validated. For many enterprise use cases (document processing, business assistants, data extraction), open models offer a better performance/cost ratio than proprietary APIs, with a reversibility the latter do not offer.

The strategic implication: any AI procurement policy should now systematically compare three scenarios — proprietary API, hosted open model (Together AI-style), and on-premise deployment. The right choice depends on volume, data sensitivity and internal skills; it evolves over time.

Cardan-AI recommendation: sign no multi-year commitment with a single vendor without a reversibility clause. The speed of this market makes lock-in expensive — flexibility is your best negotiating asset.