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Quick Answer

Fireworks AI and Together AI Popularity vs Other AI Tools

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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 AITogether AIBaseten
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 developers40x inference-volume growth in a year
Named customersCursor, HarveyCursor, Cognition, Decagon (press release)Cursor, Notion, Lovable, Harvey
Lead investorsAtreides, Index Ventures, TCVAramco VenturesAltimeter, 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

  1. 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”.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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…PickWhy
The widest catalog of open models, serverless, plus GPU clustersTogether AIBroadest self-serve offer; dedicated H100 at $5.49/GPU-hour on demand
To fine-tune and serve a specialised model at high throughputFireworks AIBuilt around customer-specialised models
To deploy your own custom model with autoscaling and complianceBasetenDedicated deployments; H100 at $0.10833/minute (~$6.50/hour)
The cheapest tokens on a popular open modelCompare per modelgpt-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.

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