Wafer, An Inference Provider That Uses Non-Nvidia Chips, Lands Acquisition Offers and $200 Million-Plus Valuation

Developers and chip designers are increasingly upbeat about the benefits of using AI to supercharge the process of designing and optimizing AI chips, as my colleague Phoebe wrote about last week.

Now, a year-old inference provider, Wafer, is trying a similar approach: using AI to improve the way models run on a variety of chips and then helping businesses to run those models.

The San Francisco-based startup recently raised $40 million in Series A funding co-led by Marathon Management Partners and Chemistry VC, cofounder and CEO Emilio Andere told The Information exclusively. The startup’s valuation now stands above $200 million, according to a person with knowledge of the round. Andere, who cofounded Wafer with his college best friend Steven Arellano in May 2025, declined to comment on the valuation.

Andere said Wafer has developed AI agents—which it calls AI inference engineers—that can take a business’ specific AI workload and optimize open-source models for that workload. For instance, Wafer’s AI inference engineers would make different optimizations to an open-source model for a voice-based AI agent, which needs to be able to quickly handle repeated prompts and bursts of traffic, than they would for a coding agent, which needs to be able to remember important context over longer periods of time, Andere said.