Fireworks AI and Together AI Popularity vs Other AI Tools
The short answer
Fireworks AI and Together AI are the two most widely used independent inference platforms in 2026, roughly tied on revenue, with Fireworks bigger by tokens served and valuation and Together bigger by developer count. They are infrastructure — APIs and GPUs developers build on — so their “popularity” is measured in tokens, revenue and developers, not app downloads.
The numbers side by side
| Signal (company-reported) | Fireworks AI | Together AI | Baseten |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latest round | $1.505B Series D, announced July 15, 2026 | $800M Series C, July 1, 2026 | $1.5B Series F, June 22, 2026 |
| Valuation | $17.5B | $8.3B post-money | $13B |
| Revenue | >$1B annualized run rate | >$1.15B annual bookings (prior quarter) | 20x growth in a year (no figure) |
| Usage | >40 trillion tokens/day | >1 million developers | 40x inference-volume growth in a year |
| Named customers | Cursor, Harvey | Cursor, Cognition, Decagon (press release) | Cursor, Notion, Lovable, Harvey |
| Lead investors | Atreides, Index Ventures, TCV | Aramco Ventures | Altimeter, Conviction, Spark Capital |
Figures are from each company’s own announcement; none is audited. Note that “run rate”, “bookings” and “growth” are different measures, so do not rank Fireworks and Together by revenue to the decimal.
What the numbers say
- Fireworks is the volume leader. Forty trillion tokens a day is the largest usage figure any independent inference company has published, and 95% of it comes from customer-specialised models. Fireworks’ pitch has moved from “fast open-model API” to “train and serve your own model”.
- Together has the broadest developer base. A million-plus developers reflects its self-serve serverless catalog and GPU clusters; its funding is aimed at growing its compute footprint.
- Baseten is the dedicated-deployment specialist. It does not publish dollar revenue, but its valuation sits between the two, and its customers run their own models on its GPUs.
- Against other AI tools: these companies are far smaller than the model labs whose APIs they compete with, and they share customers — Cursor appears on all three lists, a sign that large AI products split traffic across several providers.
Which one to use
| If you need… | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The widest catalog of open models, serverless, plus GPU clusters | Together AI | Broadest self-serve offer; dedicated H100 at $5.49/GPU-hour on demand |
| To fine-tune and serve a specialised model at high throughput | Fireworks AI | Built around customer-specialised models |
| To deploy your own custom model with autoscaling and compliance | Baseten | Dedicated deployments; H100 at $0.10833/minute (~$6.50/hour) |
| The cheapest tokens on a popular open model | Compare per model | gpt-oss-120b is $0.15/$0.60 per MTok on both Fireworks and Together |
Popularity matters for one thing: vendor risk. All three raised large rounds in mid-2026 and serve well-known production customers, so none is a fragile choice. Run a two-provider setup for failover and pick each workload on latency, price and model availability. For closed-model rates, see current API prices.
Related: Baseten vs Together AI vs Fireworks AI for inference, best LLM inference providers ranked, best inference provider for gpt-oss-120b.
Last verified: October 17, 2026.