Graphcore vs Together AI

By valuation, Together AI is the larger company at $3.3B versus $500M — a 6.6x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Graphcore employs 500-1000 people while Together AI has 100 employees.

Graphcore has raised more in total funding at $700M, compared to Together AI's $533.5M — a gap of $166.5M. Combined, the two companies have completed 6 known funding rounds.

Graphcore leads with an Awaira Score of 85/100, while Together AI sits at 77/100. That 8-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Graphcore was founded by Nigel Toon in 2016. Together AI was founded by Ce Zhang in 2022. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Graphcore: Graphcore designs the Intelligence Processing Unit, a processor architecture built specifically for machine learning workloads, offering a hardware alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI model training and inference. The Bristol-based company developed the IPU around a bulk synchronous parallel computation model that distributes model parameters across thousands of processor cores with local memory, achieving high efficiency for sparse and irregular neural network computations that GPUs handle inefficiently.\n\nThe company raised approximately $700 million across six funding rounds including a Series E that valued it at approximately $2.8 billion, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Microsoft, and Samsung Ventures. Graphcore processors are deployed in research institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, as well as commercial AI platforms. The company has shipped multiple IPU generations including the MK2 IPU and Bow IPU, with the Colossus processor and IPU-POD system providing data centre scale AI compute.\n\nGraphcore competes directly against NVIDIA in the AI accelerator market, alongside AMD, Intel Gaudi, and other AI chip startups including Cerebras, SambaNova, and Groq. The AI accelerator market is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2027, driven by demand for model training compute. Graphcore faces the dominant position of NVIDIA and its CUDA software ecosystem as the primary barrier to adoption, requiring significant software investment to match the maturity of CUDA tooling that researchers and engineers have relied on for over a decade. Together AI: Together AI is an AI infrastructure company founded in 2022 that provides cloud-based platforms for training, fine-tuning, and deploying large language models. The company operates a managed inference service and model hosting platform that enables developers and enterprises to run open-source and proprietary models at scale. Together AI's core offering allows customers to access GPU compute resources specifically optimized for LLM workloads without building infrastructure in-house. The company positions itself in the competitive inference and model deployment segment, competing with services like Replicate, Modal, and cloud providers' native ML offerings. Together AI emphasizes open-source model support and cost-efficient inference through optimized serving techniques. The platform supports popular models including Llama, Mistral, and other community-developed architectures. With $228 million in total funding and a $1.3 billion valuation as of its Series B stage, Together AI has secured substantial capital to expand its infrastructure and product capabilities. The company serves use cases spanning application development, research, and enterprise deployment scenarios. Its growth trajectory reflects increased demand for accessible LLM infrastructure alternatives to proprietary API providers, though the market remains highly competitive with low switching costs and commoditizing pricing dynamics. Together AI addresses the infrastructure gap for organizations seeking open-source LLM deployment alternatives to closed commercial APIs.

Graphcore got there first, launching in 2016 — that's 6 years of extra runway. Together AI didn't arrive until 2022. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Graphcore has about 500-1000 employees; Together AI has about 100. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Graphcore and Together AI compete in AI Infrastructure, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.