FriendliAI Secures $20M to Redefine AI Inference

We are thrilled to announce our $20 million seed extension round, led by Capstone Partners and joined by Sierra Ventures, Alumni Ventures, KDB, and KB Securities. This milestone marks a major step forward in our mission to make high-performance AI inference accessible, scalable, and cost-efficient for enterprises around the world.

This funding comes at a pivotal time, as startups and enterprises accelerate AI deployment. FriendliAI leads this shift with a cutting-edge inference platform that speeds up model inference and reduces GPU costs by up to 90% while preserving model accuracy.

Accelerating Innovation

This new capital will enable us to:

• Expand our go-to-market presence in North America and Asia to accelerate adoption and deepen enterprise engagement.
• Invest in R&D to continuously innovate across the AI inference stack and deliver the industry’s best platform.
• Scale our GPU infrastructure to meet growing demand and power the next generation of AI applications.

Our customers rely on us to run large-scale models with lightning-fast performance and dramatically reduced infrastructure costs. This funding enables us to continue delivering on that promise at a greater scale.

“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.”

Enabling AI Inference at Scale

As enterprises move from AI prototypes to production systems, inference becomes the critical bottleneck. According to IBM, 90% of LLM operational time is spent on inference, making performance and efficiency here more important than ever.

FriendliAI directly addresses three core challenges in production AI:

• Infrastructure Cost: We cut GPU spending by up to 90%, optimizing AI budgets at scale.
• Inference Speed: We deliver industry-leading response times, even for complex models.
• Operational Complexity: Our platform simplifies deployment and scaling of large models across environments.

Real-World Impact

FriendliAI is already demonstrating tangible impact across a growing ecosystem of AI developers and enterprise users.

With support for over 430,000 models from Hugging Face, the platform enables seamless, one-click deployment of advanced AI models, significantly reducing the complexity of bringing models into life. In partnership with LG AI Research, FriendliAI introduced the API access to EXAONE 4.0, their most advanced large language model. This collaboration marks the first public release of the model, expanding global access to high-performance, enterprise-grade AI. Furthermore, startups such as Scatter Lab are achieving a significant reduction in infrastructure costs by leveraging FriendliAI’s platform. In addition, Upstage, a fast-growing AI company best known for its cutting-edge Solar foundation model, relies on FriendliAI’s platform to deliver state-of-the-art inference performance.

These developments reflect the platform’s growing role in enabling real-world AI deployment through scalable, efficient, and production-ready infrastructure.

Backed by World-Class Investors

We’re proud to be supported by investors who believe in the future we’re building:

• Capstone Partners, a leading venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in innovative startups.
• Sierra Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on enterprise and frontier technologies with over $2 billion AUM, investing in companies across various sectors, including AI/ML, big data, cloud, fintech, health tech, and more.
• Alumni Ventures, one of the most active VC firms in the US, with thousands of investments made and $1.4B+ committed capital.
• KDB and KB Securities, leading investment banks in Korea.

"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."

What’s Next?

FriendliAI is building the most advanced, high-performance AI inference platform. Whether you’re a fast-scaling startup or an enterprise running mission-critical AI, we empower you to run AI faster, more efficiently, and more intelligently.

A huge thank-you to our investors, partners, and most importantly, our customers for believing in us and shaping this journey.

We’re just getting started.