The creators of the vLLM open source project have declare they transitioned a popular tool to a VC-backed startup, Infeact, raising $150 million in seed funding at a $800 million valuation.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, TechCrunch’s confirmed previous report that vLLM has raised capital from a16z.
Inferac’s debut represents the commercialization of the new SGLang project as RadixArk, which sources told us received capital worth $400 million led by Accel, as we reported on Wednesday.
As the focus in AI moves from training models to deployment in applications, a process known as inference, technologies like vLLM and SGLang that make these AI tools run faster and more affordably attract investors.
Both vLLM and SGLang were incubated in 2023 in the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica.
Infeact CEO Simon Mo, one of the project’s original creators, told Bloomberg that vLLM’s existing users include Amazon’s cloud services and shopping apps.