[8 People Achieve $8 Million ARR, AI Inference Startup Wafer Secures $40 Million Series A Funding] Beating AI News Flash: AI inference startup Wafer, with a team of only 8 people, has completed a $40 million Series A funding round, valuing the company at over $200 million. The company previously declined acquisition offers from multiple cloud providers and inference service companies. Wafer's inference business reached $8 million ARR in just about 3 months. It does not manufacture chips but primarily helps models run existing chips faster and more cost-effectively. Wafer enables AI Agents to automatically adjust models, inference engines, kernels, caching, quantization, and scheduling, while optimizing solutions for different hardware such as NVIDIA and AMD. Previously, much of this work relied on manual tuning by inference performance engineers, but Wafer aims to delegate this part to AI. In Wafer's internal testing, GLM 5.2 running on AMD MI355X achieved throughput approximately 80% of NVIDIA B200, at less than half the cost. Current customers include Vercel and Inworld AI. Vercel independently released test results, stating that Wafer's GLM 5.2 throughput is roughly twice that of other serverless providers. Following the funding round, Wafer is immediately starting to expand its team. The company has opened positions in four categories: Technology, Growth, CEO Office, and GTM, all requiring on-site presence in San Francisco five days a week. For technical roles, the base salary is $250,000, plus equity. [Original Link]