Arcee AI has raised a Series B that lifts its valuation above $1B. Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital and Emergence Capital led the round, with A10 Ventures, Hitachi, IAG, Microsoft’s M12, P7 and consultancy Wipro participating. One source told Fortune the round was worth at least $150M.
The San Francisco company is trying to become a leading American developer of open-weight models, which publish their parameters so anyone can download, modify and run them on their own infrastructure. Most U.S. labs have gone proprietary. Chinese developers have embraced open weights and shipped models that rival the best American systems.
CEO Mark McQuade has framed the gap bluntly. “The U.S. is far ahead in closed-source, but it kind of dropped the ball on open-source,” he told Fortune, arguing organizations should not have to choose between frontier capability and control over the technology at the center of their work.
Arcee’s Trinity family includes Trinity Large, with 400 billion parameters and 13 billion active per token. The company says it spent about $20M developing those models, far less than closed-source counterparts.
The new capital funds next-generation Trinity models, work with the Department of Energy and national labs on Genesis-Science-1, and further platform development.
