Building the Fastest Inference Cloud: Our Series A in Wafer

I first met Emi right after YC demo day – in the Amazonian expanse of Plant Cafe Dogpatch. Over a pesto tofu scramble, I could see that Emi was clearly smart, talented, passionate, and driven – but it was clear his product - an inference optimization platform for the big inference companies - just wasn’t working. I could see the tension between belief and realism even as he pitched me on his original premise, and the breakout push that was (not) just around the corner. My honest reaction was: I hope he works on something else.

Turns out a breakout was around the corner. Emi was working on something else, deftly pivoting earlier in the year to a new, more expansive and adjacent vision - making inference more accessible to the masses. In so doing, he leaned into the company’s competitive advantage -  moving into an exciting and demand-laden, but yes highly competitive market that many would have found too daunting to tackle. Emi would need that passion and drive – which were blatantly obvious in that first meeting – in order to battle it out with much bigger incumbents in the wild west of a newly emerging market.

One name change later, Wafer was reborn as a real-time inference cloud – taking advantage of their agents that continuously tune their inference engine, custom kernels, and hardware to each company’s exact traffic, model and SLA – in the end delivering the best performance per dollar in the market (at 30 to 50% more tokens per dollar) and climbing to #1 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard. In the process, they became the first provider to make AMD GPUs competitive with NVIDIA’s – at a materially lower cost and shorter lead time.

When Wafer posted their performance numbers, customers took notice; an engineer recently texted asking for eight figures worth of throughput “by the end of the week,” not an incoming ‘lead’ in Wafer’s funnel - a real customer. Wafer already powers Vercel, Venice, Flip, Neon Health, Brilliant, and dozens of other fast-growing AI companies, servicing 2T+ tokens a month. And it’s not unusual for me to get a random text from a CEO or CTO sharing just how Wafer’s performance gains are quickly speeding up and improving the underlying performance of their customer’s products.

So Emi and I kept meeting up until he let Chemistry co-lead their $40M Series A alongside Marathon, YCombinator, and many angels. Congrats to Emi, Steven and their entire small but mighty team (side note: they are hiring!). Kristina, Mark, and Bohan are excited to be on team Wafer for the road ahead.