January 23, 2026 — Inferact, an AI startup based by the creators of the open-source mission vLLM, has formally launched after elevating $150 million in seed funding, valuing the corporate at $800 million.
The spherical was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, with participation from Sequoia Capital, ZhenFund, and others. It ranks among the many largest seed rounds ever, underscoring quickly rising investor conviction in AI inference infrastructure as a crucial layer of the AI stack.
Inferact was based in November 2025. The corporate is led by Simon Mo, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley and one among vLLM’s founding maintainers, who serves as CEO. You Kaichao, a Tsinghua College PhD and core vLLM contributor, is a co-founder. The founding staff additionally contains key vLLM contributors equivalent to Woosuk Kwon and Joseph Gonzalez.
Initially developed at UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, vLLM is now ruled by the PyTorch Basis. The mission boasts over 2,000 international contributors, helps 500+ mannequin architectures and 200+ {hardware} accelerators, and is already utilized by main expertise corporations together with Meta and Google.
Inferact positions itself on the intersection of fashions and {hardware}. Whereas persevering with to take care of and advance the vLLM open-source ecosystem—bettering efficiency and {hardware} compatibility—the corporate will even develop business merchandise designed to assist enterprises run AI fashions extra effectively at scale.
CEO Simon Mo famous that inference is poised to devour the vast majority of newly added international compute capability, and Inferact’s mission is to scale back inference prices whereas growing pace, in the end accelerating the broader adoption of AI. The funding spherical highlights the business’s rising give attention to inference as the following frontier of AI infrastructure.
Supply: Synced
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