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Foresight News reported, according to Bloomberg, that AI startup Inferact, founded by the team behind the open-source software vLLM, has completed a $150 million seed round at a valuation of $800 million. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Lightspeed, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and ZhenFund. Inferact focuses on the inference stage of artificial intelligence, aiming to address the high operational costs and insufficient stability of current AI models. The company is built around the open-source project vLLM launched in 2023, which originally originated at the University of California, Berkeley and is now overseen by the PyTorch Foundation. Inferact CEO Simon Mo stated that the company's top priority is to continue supporting the independent open-source vLLM project, while also developing commercial products to help enterprises run AI models more efficiently across different hardware.

AI infrastructure companies obtain up to $500 million in on-chain loans by using GPU hardware as tokenized collateral, bypassing traditional banks and credit checks to achieve faster access to funds.

Foresight News reported that European crypto payment infrastructure provider Mercuryo has partnered with Visa to offer fast and low-cost global crypto-to-fiat (Off-Ramp) services through Visa's real-time payment platform, Visa Direct. This collaboration allows eligible Mercuryo users to convert their digital tokens into fiat currency and instantly transfer them to their Visa credit or debit cards. The integration will cover non-custodial wallets, exchanges, and payment networks partnered with Mercuryo.