Why we co-led DeepInfra’s $107M series B

While much attention has been given to the large capex investments to train frontier models, we have been focused on the next stage of the AI value chain: inference. Inference is the process of taking the intelligence of the models and delivering it to end users and developers. Whether we reach artificial superintelligence, or whether the models stop improving today, the demand for inference will continue.

Inference is one of the most important and fasting growing steps in the AI supply chain, . Delivering timely output tokens in response to a prompt requires optimizing speed, throughput, cost and reliability. Often these are at odds with each other and require operational tradeoffs. That is why we like investing in this space: high value with high complexity.

It is also the reason we invested in DeepInfra. The team at DeepInfra have the experience to meet the unique demands required of inference. DeepInfra’s founding team, led by co-founders Nikola Borisov and Yessen Yessenzhar Kanapin, built and scaled global, real-time systems at messaging app imo, which serves 200M+ users around the world. They are one of the few teams that have experience running distributed, high-throughput infrastructure at massive scale.

We first invested in DeepInfra back in 2024. Since then, we have witnessed firsthand the team executing with operational and technical excellence.  Across markets, tokens per day - a key metric for inference - increased significantly, with Microsoft reporting a 5× year-over-year increase in token processing on Azure, and OpenRouter growing from 10 trillion to over 100 trillion tokens per year by mid-2025; business metrics followed, with enterprise spending on AI inference APIs more than doubling from $3.5 billion to $8.4 billion in the first half of 2025 alone.  Moreover, our market hypothesis only grew: open source models continued to compete with frontier models and drive a surge in demand for inference.

We are proud to co-lead DeepInfra’s Series B funding round alongside existing investors, including our friend and co-investor Georges Harik, co-founder of humans&. We are grateful to Nikola and Yessen for this unique opportunity to deepen our partnership. Together, they have built a small but mighty team on a mission to harness the power of AI and deliver intelligence to all of us.