Inferact Lands $150M Seed Funding to Commercialize vLLM at $800M Valuation
vLLM creators launch Inferact with a $150M seed round at an $800M valuation led by a16z and Lightspeed, targeting the explosive AI inference market.
The race for AI inference efficiency has a new heavyweight champion. Inferact, the startup founded by the creators of the widely used open-source project vLLM, just secured a massive $150 million in seed funding. The round values the company at a staggering $800 million, signaling intense investor appetite for AI infrastructure.
Inferact vLLM $150M Seed Funding and Market Impact
According to reports from TechCrunch, the funding round was co-led by tech investment giants Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Lightspeed Venture Partners. On January 22, 2026, the team officially transitioned their open-source success into a commercial powerhouse. As the industry's focus pivots from training massive models to deploying them efficiently, technologies that make inference faster and cheaper are becoming essential.
The Rise of Inference-as-a-Business
Inferact mirrors the trajectory of other Berkeley-born projects like SGLang, which recently commercialized as RadixArk with a $400 million valuation. CEO Simon Mo noted that vLLM's existing user base already includes heavyweights like Amazon, proving that the demand for cost-effective AI operations is already at a boiling point.
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