Core Insights - The core viewpoint of the article is the establishment of a new company, Inferact, by the core team behind the open-source inference framework vLLM, which has successfully raised $150 million in seed funding, achieving a valuation of $800 million [1][2][7]. Funding and Market Trends - The $150 million seed round marks a new high in AI infrastructure funding and is one of the largest seed rounds in history [2]. - Investors highlight a shift in focus from training to inference as AI applications mature, with a growing need for low-cost, reliable operation of existing models [4][9]. Company Mission and Strategy - Inferact aims to address the "inference bottleneck" by building the next-generation commercial engine to tackle large-scale deployment challenges [5]. - The company plans to maintain a dual approach, supporting vLLM as an independent open-source project while developing commercial products to enhance hardware efficiency for AI model deployment [12][14]. Technology and Market Validation - vLLM has already been deployed in real-world industrial environments, including Amazon's core shopping application, validating its stability under high concurrency [10][11]. - The demand for low-cost, reliable operation of existing models has surpassed expectations for new model development [9]. Founding Team and Expertise - Simon Mo, the CEO, has a background in machine learning systems design and was an early engineer at Anyscale, bringing experience in transforming research into industrial-grade products [26][27]. - Co-founder Woosuk Kwon, a PhD from UC Berkeley, contributed significant innovations to vLLM, including the Paged Attention algorithm [30][31]. - The team also includes Kaichao You, a Tsinghua University award winner, and experienced advisors from academia and industry, enhancing the company's technical and strategic capabilities [33][36].