The open source project has creators of VLLM announcement That they turned the popular tool into a VC-backed startup, Infract, raised $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation.

The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, TechCrunch confirmed. Previous reporting That vLLM raised capital from a16z.

Inferact’s debut mirrors the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which sources told us has secured capital at a $400 million valuation led by Accel. We have reported on wednesday

As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, a process known as inference, technologies like vLLM and SGLang that run these AI tools faster and more cost-effectively, are gaining investor attention.

Both VLLM and SGlang were incubated in the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoecker in 2023.

Infract CEO Simon Moe, one of the project’s original creators, told Bloomberg that VLLM’s existing users include Amazon’s cloud services and shopping apps.