Startup Inferact raised $150 million to commercialize vLLM

The creators of the open source project vLLM have Announce They turned 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, underscoring TechCrunch’s success. Previous reports vLLM raised capital from a16z.

Inferact’s debut reflects the recent marketing of SGLang’s venture as RadixArk, which sources tell us has a capital secured valuation of $400 million led by Accel, as Inform us Wednesday.

As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, the process known as heuristics, and technologies like vLLM and SGLang that make these AI tools work faster and at lower cost are attracting the attention of investors.

Both vLLM and SGLang were incubated in 2023 at the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica.

Current users of vLLM include Amazon’s cloud service and shopping app, Inferact CEO Simon Moe, one of the project’s original creators, told Bloomberg.