Together, a startup developing open source generative AI, has raised $20 million in a seed round led by Lux Capital with participation from several other investors. The company is building a cloud platform for running, training, and fine-tuning open source models that offer scalable compute at lower prices than dominant vendors like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure. Together aims to create open source generative AI models and services that help organizations incorporate AI into their production applications. One of its first projects, RedPajama, aims to foster a set of open source generative models, including chat models along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company’s efforts are a bit duplicative in the context of the broader AI landscape, but it brings greater transparency, control, and privacy to the table. Its mission is to build and steward a self-sustaining, open ecosystem that produces the best AI systems for humanity. The company is planning to increase the size of its team from 24 employees to around 40 by the end of the year and spend the rest of the seed capital on R&D, infrastructure, and product development.
