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Arcee AI Valued Above $1B After Series B for Open-Weight Models

Arcee AI has raised an undisclosed Series B led by Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital and Emergence Capital, lifting its valuation above $1 billion as it develops open-weight Trinity models.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-17 12:49

According to SiliconANGLE, one source told Fortune the round was worth at least $150 million. Arcee is trying to become one of the top U.S. developers of open-weight models, which publicly release their core numerical parameters so anyone can download, modify and run them on their own infrastructure.

Co-founder and CEO Mark McQuade told Fortune, according to SiliconANGLE, that Arcee is developing open-weight models because he believes American companies should have more control over the AI systems they use. “Organizations should not have to choose between the capabilities of a frontier model and the ability to control the technology at the center of their work,” he said.

The company’s approach differs from most U.S. AI developers, which have kept their models proprietary and often dictate where they can be run. Most Chinese AI developers have embraced open weights and built powerful, accessible models that match advanced systems from OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC and Google LLC. McQuade said his goal is for Arcee to catch up with China’s leading AI developers. “The U.S. is far ahead in closed-source, but it kind of dropped the ball on open-source,” he told Fortune.

Arcee has released a family of models called Trinity over the past year. The most powerful, Trinity Large, has 400 billion parameters and 13 billion active for each token. The startup developed the Trinity models at a much lower cost than most closed-source counterparts, spending around $20 million last year on compute infrastructure, data, operations and developer and engineer salaries.

McQuade told Fortune that Arcee had only about $30 million available when it decided to start building its own models. “I said, ‘let’s do it’ and I bet the company on it,” he said. Almost 70% of its total capital went toward developing the Trinity models. Before building its own models, Arcee worked on post-training and fine-tuning AI models, providing infrastructure and tools to companies adapting existing models. It was founded in 2023 after McQuade left Hugging Face Inc., which is now being acquired by Nvidia Corp.

Arcee will use the new funding to train a next generation of open-weight Trinity models that are already under development, McQuade said. It will also expand work with the U.S. Department of Energy and 17 national laboratories on Genesis-Science-1, an open-weight model for scientific computing and research tasks. The startup will continue investing in infrastructure and products for companies that want to customize, test and deploy open-weight models.

Monti Saroya of Vista Equity Partners said Arcee and its team have shown a rare combination of solid technical execution and capital efficiency, building the Trinity models at an impressively rapid pace and low cost. “As enterprises increasingly look for AI systems they can control, customize and deploy on their own terms, we believe Arcee is building critical infrastructure,” he said.