July 1 (Reuters) - Together AI on Wednesday said it has raised $800 million in a funding round led by Aramco Ventures 2222.SE, more than doubling the artificial intelligence startup's valuation to $8.3 billion.

Founded in 2022, the startup's platform lets companies train and run AI workloads on open models such as DeepSeek, MiniMax and Kimi at lower costs than closed systems.

• Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia NVDA.O, Salesforce Ventures CRM.N, March Capital, Pegatron and SentinelOne's S.N S Ventures participated in the Series C round.

• Together AI was valued at $3.3 billion in a February 2025 funding round led by General Catalyst, which had more than doubled its earlier $1.25 billion valuation from March 2024.

• The company said it would use the Series C funding to widen its offerings as it expands into a provider of inference, which is the process of running trained AI models.

• "The future of AI won't be owned by a few companies. It will be built by millions of developers and businesses, and open-source models are making that possible,” Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash said.

• The AI startup's annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter on the back of rising open-source model usage, the company said. It counts firms such as Cursor, Cognition and Decagon among its customers.

• Together AI expects its computing capacity and infrastructure to expand roughly 50-fold over the next five years.