AI inference startup Wafer completes a $40 million Series A funding round with a valuation exceeding $200 million.

Dynamic Beating AI News: Wafer, an AI inference startup with only eight team members, has raised $40 million in Series A funding, valuing the company at over $200 million. Previously, the company turned down acquisition offers from multiple cloud providers and inference service vendors. Wafer achieved $8 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from its inference business in just three months. It does not manufacture chips; instead, it helps models run faster and more cost-effectively on existing hardware. Wafer enables AI agents to automatically optimize models, inference engines, kernels, caching, quantization, and scheduling, then identifies the optimal configurations for different hardware such as NVIDIA and AMD. Previously, much of this work required manual tuning by inference performance engineers—Wafer aims to automate this process with AI. In its own tests, GLM 5.2 running on AMD MI355X achieved approximately 80% of the throughput of NVIDIA B200 at less than half the cost. Current customers include Vercel and Inworld AI. Vercel has also independently published test results showing that Wafer delivers roughly twice the throughput of other serverless providers when running GLM 5.2. Immediately after closing the funding round, Wafer began expanding its team, currently hiring for four roles: engineering, growth, CEO’s office, and GTM—all requiring full-time on-site presence in San Francisco five days per week. Engineering positions offer a base salary of $250,000 plus equity.