Inference startup Inferact lands $150M to commercialize vLLM

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.