Startup profile · funding coverage
Inferact funding, valuation and investors
Company behind vLLM — open-source LLM inference engine used by Meta, Google, and Character.ai in production.
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Seed
$150M · January 2026
Latest known valuation
$800M
Seed · January 2026
Total disclosed equity funding
$150M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
private
seed · San Francisco, California
Investors in latest funding
Lead: Andreessen Horowitz , Lightspeed Venture Partners
Other: Sequoia Capital , Altimeter Capital , Redpoint Ventures
Overview
Inferact is the company behind vLLM, the open-source LLM inference engine used in production by Meta, Google, and Character.ai. It raised one of the largest seed rounds of 2026 to commercialize inference infrastructure.
Why Inferact is interesting
One of largest seed rounds of 2026; explicit mission to fund vLLM OSS while building inference products.
Product & use cases
Inferact is the company behind vLLM — the dominant open-source LLM inference engine — building commercial inference products while funding OSS development.
- Production LLM inference at scale
- Open-source vLLM maintenance and optimization
- Universal inference layer across hardware and model architectures
Key facts
- Seed (2026): $150M at $800M valuation co-led by a16z and Lightspeed for vLLM commercialization — TechCrunch
- vLLM is the dominant open-source LLM inference engine used by Meta, Google, and Character.ai in production
Funding history (newest first)
Investors in our directory
Funds linked from Inferact's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.
Competitive landscape
Edge: vLLM runs on 400K+ GPUs concurrently with 2,000+ contributors — Meta, Google, Character.ai use in production per a16z.
Inference cost is the bottleneck for production LLM apps. Inferact's explicit mission is funding vLLM OSS — commercial layer must complement, not compete with, existing providers using vLLM.
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TensorRT-LLM (NVIDIA) direct
Hardware-vendor inference stack; vLLM hardware-agnostic OSS.
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TGI (Hugging Face) direct
Open-source inference server; vLLM larger production footprint.
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SGLang/RadixArk direct
Berkeley-lab sibling project also commercializing (2026).
Notable stories
- One of largest seed rounds in history — $150M at $800M valuation (TechCrunch, Jan 2026).
- Founded by vLLM maintainers including Simon Mo and Kaichao You — incubated at UC Berkeley Ion Stoica lab.
Industries
Related funding articles
Venture Capital Tracker pieces that cover Inferact's financing or category context.
FAQs about Inferact
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