Inference startup Inferact lands $150M to commercialize vLLM | TechCrunch

"The creators of the open-source project vLLM have announced that they transitioned the popular tool into a VC-backed startup, Inferact, raising $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming TechCrunch's earlier reporting that vLLM has raised capital from a16z. Inferact's debut mirrors the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which sources told us secured capital at a $400 million valuation led by Accel, as we reported on Wednesday."

"As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, a process known as inference, technologies like vLLM and SGLang that make these AI tools run faster and more affordably are attracting investor attention. Both vLLM and SGLang were incubated in 2023 at the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica. Inferact CEO Simon Mo, one of the project's original creators, told Bloomberg that existing users of vLLM include Amazon's cloud service and the shopping app."

The creators of the open-source project vLLM transitioned the tool into a VC-backed startup, Inferact, raising $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The debut parallels commercialization of SGLang as RadixArk at a $400 million valuation led by Accel. vLLM and SGLang accelerate AI inference, reducing cost and latency for deploying models in applications. Both projects were incubated in 2023 at the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica. Inferact's users include Amazon's cloud service and a shopping app.

Read at TechCrunch