The creators of the open source project vLLM have announced that they are moving the popular tool to VC-backed startup Inferact, which has raised $150 million in seed funding at a valuation of $800 million.
The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming TechCrunch's previous report that vLLM raised funding from a16z.
Inferact's debut reflects the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which, as we reported on Wednesday, has secured capital led by Accel at a valuation of $400 million, according to sources.
As the focus of AI shifts from training models to deployment into applications (a process called inference), technologies such as vLLM and SGLang that can run these AI tools faster and more affordably are gaining 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 project's founders, told Bloomberg that vLLM's existing users include Amazon's cloud services and shopping apps.