Inference startup Inferact lands $150M to commercialize vLLM

The team behind the open-source initiative vLLM has successfully transitioned their popular tool into a venture capital-supported startup named Inferact. This significant move has been bolstered by an impressive $150 million in seed funding, placing the company's valuation at $800 million. The funding round was co-led by prominent investors Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming earlier reports by TechCrunch regarding the financial backing from a16z. Inferact's launch is reminiscent of the recent commercialization of the SGLang project, which has now evolved into RadixArk, attracting funding at a valuation of $400 million, led by Accel, as previously reported. As the artificial intelligence landscape shifts from model training to application deployment—commonly referred to as inference—innovative technologies like vLLM and SGLang, which enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI tools, are garnering significant interest from investors. Both vLLM and SGLang were developed in 2023 at the UC Berkeley lab founded by Ion Stoica, a co-founder of Databricks. Simon Mo, CEO of Inferact and one of the project's original creators, shared insights with Bloomberg, revealing that notable users of vLLM include Amazon's cloud services and a popular shopping application, underscoring the tool's practical applications in the real world.