Arcee AI Hits $1B Valuation With Vista-Led Series B
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Arcee AI has raised a Series B round that values the open-weight model developer at more than $1 billion. The company did not disclose the amount, though one source told Fortune the round was worth at least $150 million.
Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, and Emergence Capital led the financing. A10 Ventures, Hitachi, IAG, Microsoft’s M12, P7, and the consultancy Wipro also took part.
The San Francisco company is trying to become one of the leading US developers of open-weight models, meaning models that publicly release their core numerical parameters so anyone can download them, modify them, and run them on their own infrastructure.
That puts Arcee against the grain. Most US AI developers have gone proprietary, keeping the underlying code private and often dictating where the models can run. Chinese developers have taken the opposite path, releasing highly accessible models that match the capabilities of the most advanced closed systems.
Its model family is called Trinity, all released within the past year. The most powerful of them, Trinity Large, carries 400 billion parameters with 13 billion active per token.
The cost is the part that stands out. Arcee spent roughly $20 million developing those models last year, covering compute infrastructure, data, operations, and engineering salaries. When the company decided to start building its own models it had about $30 million available, and nearly 70% of its total capital went into Trinity.
Before that, Arcee worked on post-training and fine-tuning, giving companies the infrastructure and tools to adapt existing models for their own purposes. Mark McQuade founded it in 2023 after leaving Hugging Face, which Nvidia is now acquiring.
The new money goes toward training the next generation of Trinity models, already under development, and expanding the company’s work with the US Department of Energy and 17 national laboratories on Genesis-Science-1, an open-weight model for scientific computing and research. Arcee also plans to keep investing in the products companies use to customize, test, and deploy open-weight models.
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