Arcee AI
Arcee AI is a privately held US model developer founded in 2023. It publishes the Trinity and AFM families and earlier adaptations of Llama and Qwen.
Company & leadership
- Co-founder and CEO
- Mark McQuade
- CTO
- Lucas Atkins
Founders
- Mark McQuade, Brian Benedict and Jacob Solawetz
From model adaptation to foundation models
Arcee's founding team included Mark McQuade and Brian Benedict, who had worked at Hugging Face, and Jacob Solawetz, who came from Roboflow. Its early work focused on adapting smaller models with model merging and selective training. Emergence Capital first invested in 2024.
The next stage of the company
In September 2026, Arcee announced a Series B led by Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital and Emergence Capital. It reported a valuation above $1 billion. The stated plans included further Trinity development, work with US Department of Energy laboratories and tools for deploying open models.
Distinguish original training from adaptation
Trinity and AFM are Arcee foundation-model lines. The earlier SuperNova entries identify their Llama or Qwen ancestry. Arcee's hosted API catalog also lists models from other developers; hosting those models does not make Arcee their original author.
What this selection covers
Practical guidance. This selection covers four Trinity instruction or reasoning checkpoints, AFM-4.5B and three major SuperNova releases. It lists published weights and preserves experimental labels. It does not enumerate every base model, precision conversion, older merge, hosted third-party model or private customer adaptation.
Use the checkpoint's actual terms
The reviewed Trinity checkpoint cards name OpenMDW-1.1. The AFM-4.5B card names Apache 2.0. SuperNova entries retain their stated base-model ancestry and licensing. Do not apply a general marketing statement about one family to every downloaded release.