Inferact is a Berkeley- and San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, the most widely used open-source engine for running large language models. The company commercializes vLLM - which at any moment powers inference on more than 400,000 GPUs worldwide - by funneling paid engineering resources back into the open project while building a next-generation commercial 'universal inference layer' meant to make AI inference cheaper and faster. Inferact launched publicly in January 2026 with a $150 million seed round at an $800 million valuation, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed.
Arago is a Paris and Palo Alto deeptech startup building a photonic AI accelerator that uses light instead of electrons to run AI workloads, targeting 10x lower energy consumption than today's leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost while staying compatible with PyTorch and standard hardware ecosystems.
Gimlet Labs is a San Francisco applied research company building the first multi-silicon inference cloud - software that runs AI workloads simultaneously across CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators. Founded by ex-Google and ex-NVIDIA engineers behind the Pixie observability project, Gimlet ships Gimlet Cloud (serverless agent inference) and kforge (autonomous kernel generation from PyTorch). The company exited stealth in October 2025 with eight-figure revenue and raised an $80M Series A led by Menlo Ventures in March 2026.
Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.
Fireworks AI is a generative AI inference platform founded in 2022 by seven engineers — five of whom built PyTorch at Meta — that gives enterprises fast, cost-efficient, and customizable access to hundreds of open-source models. The company's proprietary FireAttention kernels and speculative-execution engine deliver up to 40× faster inference and 8× cost reduction versus alternatives, while its fine-tuning and model-deployment tooling lets companies own their AI stack end-to-end. With $327M+ raised, a $4B valuation, 10,000+ customers including Samsung, Uber, Shopify, and Cursor, and a $315M annualized run-rate as of early 2026, Fireworks AI has become the go-to inference layer for production generative AI applications.