AI reasoning track takes off: Inferact raises $150 million in funding, led by a16z

【Blockchain Rhythm】Recently, the AI inference track has seen significant funding. The core team behind the open-source vLLM project founded the AI company Inferact, which just completed $150 million in seed funding, valuing the company at $800 million. This round of financing was led jointly by a16z and Lightspeed, with top venture capital firms like Sequoia, Altimeter, and Redpoint participating, along with ZhenFund.

Why pay attention to this company? Inferact focuses on AI model inference optimization — a very practical pain point. Currently, the inference costs of large models are exorbitant, and stability is also insufficient. Their approach is to start with bottom-layer optimization to make inference cheaper and more stable. The project originated at Berkeley and is now overseen by the PyTorch Foundation, with a strong technical background.

The signals from this round of funding are clear: the competition in the second half of AI is shifting from training to inference, and investment in infrastructure layers is heating up. For Web3 investors, this is also worth watching — because the logic of efficiency optimization is equally applicable in the blockchain space.