The team behind the open-source initiative vLLM has revealed they have transformed the widely-used tool into a venture capital-supported company called Inferact, securing $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation.

This launch follows a similar path to the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which, according to sources, obtained funding at a $400 million valuation led by Accel earlier this week.

As the emphasis in artificial intelligence moves from training models to putting them into practical use—a stage referred to as inference—technologies such as vLLM and SGLang, which enhance the speed and cost-effectiveness of running these AI tools, are drawing significant investor interest.

Both vLLM and SGLang were developed in 2023 within the UC Berkeley laboratory of Ion Stoica, a co-founder of Databricks.

Simon Mo, the CEO of Inferact and one of the original creators of vLLM, informed Bloomberg that current users of the tool include Amazon's cloud service and a popular shopping application.