Arcee AI Completes Series B Funding, Raising at Least $150 Million with a Pre-Money Valuation of $1 Billion

动察 Beating AI News Flash: Open-weight AI model startup Arcee AI has completed a Series B funding round at a $1 billion pre-money valuation. The round was led by Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, and Emergence Capital, with participation from Microsoft's M12, AI10 Ventures, Hitachi, IAG, P7, and Wipro. The company did not disclose the funding amount, but people familiar with the matter said it reached at least $150 million.

Arcee AI was founded in 2023 and initially focused on model post-training. In 2025, after Meta scaled back its investment in open-weight models, the company decided to train its own models from scratch and invested approximately $20 million, equivalent to 65% to 70% of its then $30 million in cash on hand, to train four open-weight models. These include the 400-billion-parameter model Trinity Large, released in early 2026.

Arcee said its models outperform Meta Llama 3 on some benchmarks and reach levels comparable to Mistral and some Chinese models. The new funding will be used to develop open-weight models and related products, expand its partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, and serve enterprises in Vista's portfolio. Founder Mark McQuade said the company's goal is to narrow the gap between the United States and China in the open-model space.