San Francisco-based Arcee AI has secured $150 million in a new funding round, pushing the company's valuation past $1 billion. The startup, founded in June 2023 by Mark McQuade, Jacob Solawetz, and Brian Benedict, previously raised between $30 million and $50 million.
The investment round included participation from the venture arms of Microsoft (M12), Hitachi Ventures, Samsung Next, Wipro, and Prosperity7 Ventures. Arcee AI currently employs approximately 30 people, resulting in a valuation per employee exceeding $33 million.
The company plans to use the capital to develop an open-weight model with over one trillion parameters. Arcee AI previously spent $20 million to train its Trinity model family, utilizing 2,048 Nvidia Blackwell B300 GPUs over a six-month period.
The Trinity family includes models ranging from the 6 billion parameter Nano version to the 400 billion parameter Large/Thinking model. The latter uses a mixture-of-experts architecture, activating roughly 13 billion parameters per query to optimize inference costs.
Arcee AI releases its core models under the Apache 2.0 license, targeting enterprises in regulated sectors like finance and defense. The company aims to provide alternatives for organizations that require data residency and cannot rely on third-party API-based AI services.
