Inferact completes $150 million seed round at $800 million valuation, led by a16z and Lightspeed

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.