The open-source project is owned by the creators of VLLM. announced He spun off the popular tool into a VC-backed startup, Inferact, and raised $150 million in seed funding at a valuation of $800 million.
The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirmed TechCrunch. earlier reporting That vLLM has raised capital from a16z.
Infarct’s launch mirrors the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArc, which sources tell us has secured capital at a valuation of $400 million led by Accel, as we reported On Wednesday.
As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, a process known as inference, technologies like VLLMs and SGlang that run these AI tools faster and more affordably are attracting investor attention.
Both VLLM and SGlang were incubated in Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica’s UC Berkeley lab in 2023.
Inferact CEO Simon Mo, one of the original creators of the project, told Bloomberg that existing users of VLLM include Amazon’s cloud service and shopping apps.
