SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Arcee AI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company building frontier open-weight foundation models, today announced its Series B funding round led by Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, and Emergence Capital, valuing the company at more than $1 billion. AI10 Ventures, Hitachi, IAG, M12, P7, and Wipro also participated in the round.
Arcee will use the investment to accelerate development of its next generation of frontier open-weight models, expand its work with the U.S. Department of Energy and its national laboratories, and launch a new generation of products that help organizations customize, deploy and operate open models.
The financing follows a period of rapid technical progress for Arcee. Over the past year, the company developed and released the Trinity family of models, culminating in Trinity Large, a 400-billion-parameter sparse mixture-of-experts model with 13 billion active parameters per token. Arcee developed its entire 2025 model lineup, including Trinity Large, for approximately $20 million, demonstrating a capital-efficient approach to training models at frontier scale.
“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,” said Mark McQuade, co-founder and CEO of Arcee AI. “We founded Arcee around the belief that developers, enterprises and public institutions should be able to inspect, adapt, deploy and own their models. This funding gives us the resources to take that vision further: building more capable open models, expanding the products around them and putting American open-weight AI on a path to compete at the highest level.”
Unlike closed-model services, open-weight models give organizations greater control over where and how their AI systems operate. Customers can deploy models within their own environments, adapt them for specialized tasks and data, and maintain greater visibility into the technology underlying sensitive or mission-critical applications.
Demand for this level of ownership is growing among enterprises, developers, research institutions and government agencies. Arcee’s model and product strategy is designed to make open-weight AI a practical foundation for these organizations without requiring them to compromise on capability, security or cost.
“Arcee has demonstrated a rare combination of technical execution and capital efficiency, building frontier open-weight models at a pace and cost profile that stands out in the market,” said Monti Saroya, Senior Managing Director at Vista Equity Partners. “As enterprises increasingly look for AI systems they can control, customize and deploy on their own terms, we believe Arcee is building critical infrastructure for the next generation of software and are excited to support the team’s long-term vision.”
Building frontier models efficiently
Arcee began developing the Trinity family to address a gap in the AI market: while many highly funded U.S. laboratories build closed systems, organizations increasingly want capable models they can operate and adapt themselves.
The company first developed Trinity Nano and Trinity Mini, using the smaller models to validate its architecture, training data and mixture-of-experts approach. It then applied those lessons at a significantly larger scale with Trinity Large.
The result is a family of open-weight models designed for developers and organizations that need control over deployment, customization and economics. Arcee’s models can support uses ranging from agentic and enterprise applications to specialized scientific workloads.
“Efficiency has shaped every part of how we build,” said Lucas Atkins, chief technology officer of Arcee AI. “It has forced us to be deliberate about architecture, data, training and post-training rather than treating compute as a substitute for technical judgment. Trinity proved that our team can build at frontier scale. The next phase is about applying everything we learned to make the models more capable, more useful and more economical across the entire family.”
Expanding open AI for scientific research
Arcee is also working with the U.S. Department of Energy and its 17 national laboratories on Genesis-Science-1, an open model for scientific computing being developed under the Genesis Open Models Initiative.
The collaboration reflects a central use case for open-weight AI: institutions conducting sensitive and specialized work need the ability to run models within their own computing environments, examine how the systems were built and adapt them for specific scientific disciplines.
Arcee plans to expand this work as part of its next stage of growth. The company will invest in models and supporting technology for research institutions and other organizations that require greater transparency, customization and deployment control than closed AI systems typically provide.
Advancing the Trinity model family and product platform
Arcee will deploy the Series B financing across three primary areas:
- Frontier model development: Training the next generation of the Trinity family and transferring advances from its largest models into more efficient models suitable for a range of infrastructure environments.
- Scientific collaboration: Expanding the company’s work with the Department of Energy and national laboratories, beginning with Genesis-Science-1 and the Genesis Open Models Initiative.
- Products and infrastructure: Developing tools that make it easier for organizations to customize, evaluate, deploy and operate open models in production.
The company will also continue growing its research, engineering and product teams as it scales model development and supports broader enterprise adoption.
“The first phase of Trinity was about proving that a focused team could build a frontier open-weight model efficiently in the United States,” McQuade said. “The next phase is about building the best open models in the world—and making them accessible to every organization that wants to own the intelligence it builds on.”
About Arcee AI
Arcee AI builds frontier open-weight foundation models and the products organizations need to customize, deploy and operate them. Its Trinity family gives developers, enterprises, researchers and public institutions greater control over their AI systems, including the ability to inspect, adapt, self-host and deploy models on their own terms. Arcee is also collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy and its national laboratories on Genesis-Science-1, an open model for scientific computing. Learn more at www.arcee.ai.
Contact Mark McQuade CEO & Founder, Arcee AI mark@arcee.ai
