Derek Chamorro
Head of Security, TogetherAI
Todd Thiel
Security Engineer, TogetherAI
Kate McGraw
IT Engineer, TogetherAI
Todd Thiel
Security Engineer, TogetherAI
Company name
Together AI
Industry
AI Infrastructure
Company size
~400
Together AI is one of the most ambitious companies building the future of open-source AI infrastructure. With rapid growth and increasing complexity across their internal systems, the company’s lean IT and security teams are responsible for supporting a fast-scaling organization without slowing it down.
The security team is deeply innovative and forward-thinking. Derek leads security strategy, Todd leads enterprise security and identity, and Kate - the first IT support hire - manages onboarding, ticketing, and day-to-day IT operations. Initially, IT ticketing and access management ran through Linear, which wasn’t designed for IT use cases. As Together scaled, the volume and complexity of requests quickly outgrew their existing tools, increasing both operational drag and security risk. It was clear they needed a more flexible, automated solution.
The team isn’t actively searching for a new tool. In fact, Kate says they were “about to sign a contract to roll out [another system]” when they met with Serval. But after hearing what Serval was building and why, she was “immediately hooked.”
"It's like having another teammate."
Kate McGraw
IT Engineer, TogetherAI
Todd’s favorite example of Serval’s impact happens on a commuter train. On his way to work, he built some of the company’s first complex infrastructure workflows entirely through Serval’s natural language interface, in just a couple of hours. Today, he feels that “with Serval, I can create complex guidance, workflow, and approval logic in a day, before lunchtime - historically, that would take months with legacy IT Service Desk solutions, and weeks with modern just-in-time access tools."
Serval now automates 95% of just-in-time infrastructure access requests and, because you're able to see all of the access profiles and access logs via a single platform, the team feels confident that their infrastructure is managed securely.
“Serval is performing all of the authorization logic for granting access to infrastructure for us, and it’s doing it in a transparent way.”
Todd Thiel
Security Engineer, TogetherAI
For Derek, Serval’s biggest security value is how it precisely controls just-in-time access and provides necessary guardrails in any situation, calling out that “most importantly it deprovisions automatically so that it's not depending on the host to remember to remove access, which improves security and compliance.”
Serval gives the security team guardrails and visibility without slowing employees down. Derek sums it up: “I don’t see Serval as just being a core ITSM tool — I see it as a tool that any security team can use as part of their user access reviews or their day-to-day security operations.”
With significant portions of infrastructure management automated, Kate notes that Together AI has more than doubled in size since adopting Serval: “Using Serval has allowed us to free up a lot of time for a million other things that we have to do. Things that allow us to help the company grow and build to a bigger team.”
This has impacted both the individuals and the function as a whole. As Derek is thinking “We’ve saved days, not minutes or hours, but days of time of having to wait because Serval does a lot of the automatic provisioning for us… It gets rid of a lot of the low-level stuff that was the most painful to do and allows us to be able to focus on the future.”
"We’ve saved days, not minutes or hours, but days of time of having to wait because Serval does a lot of the automatic provisioning for us."
Derek Chamorro
Head of Security, TogetherAI
Admin and employees are impacted alike - and in the best way possible. Serval’s natural language interface is so smooth that employees often don’t realize they’re not talking to a human. Kate says: “The feedback on Serval has been positive so far. People are really impressed with the way that it sounds like they're talking to a person. I think a lot of the time they don't realize they're not talking to us when they're having conversations on the tickets.”
What's Next
The team plans to extend Serval’s automation deeper into IT ticketing, including onboarding/offboarding workflows, device and SaaS app provisioning, and common IT requests like password resets and distribution list changes. On the infrastructure side, they aim to automate more Terraform and AWS IAM role workflows, continuing to replace manual processes with policy-driven automations.