Wafer raises $40M for inference optimization

Wafer raised a $40 million Series A co-led by Marathon and Chemistry, with AMD Ventures, Wing, Outset Capital, Fifty Years, and Y Combinator participating, according to the company’s funding announcement. Wafer says its system learns traffic patterns and performance constraints, then tunes the model, inference engine, kernels, and hardware continuously instead of relying on one manual optimization pass before deployment. Operators should benchmark that promised serving efficiency against current GPU costs before buying new silicon; the archive’s model cost-per-point analysis shows why inference economics can matter as much as model choice.