FriendliAI announced the successful close of its $20 million seed extension round, led by Capstone Partners with participation from Sierra Ventures, Alumni Ventures, KDB, and KB Securities. The new funding represents a significant milestone in the company’s mission to make high-performance AI inference accessible, scalable, and cost-efficient for enterprises worldwide.
The investment arrives at a pivotal moment as both startups and large enterprises accelerate AI deployment. FriendliAI is addressing this shift with its advanced inference platform, which accelerates model performance while cutting GPU costs by up to 90% all without compromising model accuracy.
Driving the Next Wave of AI Innovation
With this latest capital, FriendliAI will:
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Expand its go-to-market presence across North America and Asia to strengthen enterprise adoption.
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Invest further in R&D to advance the AI inference stack and deliver an industry-leading platform.
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Scale GPU infrastructure to meet the growing demands of enterprise-grade AI applications.
Enterprises rely on FriendliAI to operate large-scale models with exceptional speed and efficiency. This funding will enable the company to deliver its solutions at greater scale while ensuring significant cost savings.
“The AI inference market is exploding as more organizations move from AI experimentation to production deployment,” said Byung-Gon Chun, CEO and Co-founder of FriendliAI. “This funding underscores the strength of our approach and positions us to capture the massive opportunity ahead.”
Tackling the AI Inference Bottleneck
As enterprises transition from prototypes to production systems, inference has emerged as the primary performance barrier. According to IBM, 90% of LLM operational time is spent on inference, making efficiency here mission-critical.
FriendliAI’s platform addresses three of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI deployment:
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Infrastructure Cost: Reducing GPU spending by up to 90%, enabling organizations to optimize AI budgets at scale.
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Inference Speed: Delivering industry-leading response times, even for highly complex models.
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Operational Complexity: Simplifying deployment and scaling of large models across diverse environments.
Also Read: OpenAI Launches gpt-realtime and Expands Realtime API with New Production-Ready Features
Real-World Applications at Scale
FriendliAI is already demonstrating measurable results across an expanding ecosystem of developers and enterprises. Supporting more than 430,000 models from Hugging Face, the platform allows one-click deployment of advanced AI models dramatically streamlining operational workflows.
In collaboration with LG AI Research, FriendliAI introduced API access to EXAONE 4.0, LG’s most advanced large language model, marking its first public release. Startups like Scatter Lab have achieved substantial reductions in infrastructure costs, while AI company Upstage leverages FriendliAI’s platform to deliver high-performance inference for its Solar foundation model.
These real-world deployments highlight the platform’s ability to enable efficient, scalable, and production-ready AI infrastructure.
Backed by Leading Global Investors
FriendliAI’s vision is supported by top-tier investors:
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Capstone Partners – a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in groundbreaking startups.
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Sierra Ventures – a $2B AUM firm focused on enterprise and frontier technologies.
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Alumni Ventures – one of the most active VC firms in the U.S. with $1.4B+ in committed capital.
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KDB and KB Securities – leading Korean investment banks.
“FriendliAI has demonstrated exceptional technical innovation in the AI inference space,” said Eunkang Song, Partner at Capstone Partners. “Their platform’s ability to deliver superior performance, while reducing costs, makes them an ideal partner for enterprises scaling their AI operations. We’re thrilled to lead this round.”
“FriendliAI represents exactly the kind of infrastructure innovation that’s needed to support the next wave of AI adoption,” said Ben Yu, Partner at Sierra Ventures. “Their continued growth demonstrates the strong market demand for efficient, scalable AI inference solutions.”
Looking Ahead
FriendliAI continues its mission to build the most advanced, high-performance AI inference platform on the market. Whether serving fast-growing startups or global enterprises with mission-critical AI needs, the company is empowering organizations to run AI faster, more efficiently, and more intelligently.
The company expressed gratitude to its investors, partners, and customers for their trust and support in driving this next chapter of growth.