Wafer has raised $40 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Marathon Management Partners and Chemistry. Wing Venture Capital, AMD Ventures and Outset Capital participated, while existing investors Fifty Years and Y Combinator also joined the round.
Founded in 2025 by Emilio Andere and Steven Arellano, Wafer is a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure startup focused on improving AI inference performance. The company participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch.
Wafer develops AI systems that act as performance engineers for AI inference workloads. Its technology analyzes workload traffic patterns and performance constraints, then optimizes deployments across models, inference engines, kernels and hardware. The company offers serverless and dedicated inference infrastructure for open-source AI models.
The new capital will be used to automate more of Wafer’s inference optimization process and further develop infrastructure designed to continuously improve AI deployment performance.
Wafer previously announced a $4 million seed round in April 2026 led by Fifty Years, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures and Y Combinator.
