FriendliAI announced the successful closing of its $20 million seed extension round, led by Capstone Partners with participation from Sierra Ventures, Alumni Ventures, KDB, and KB Securities. This funding milestone underscores the company’s mission to make high-performance AI inference accessible, scalable, and cost-efficient for enterprises worldwide.
The investment comes at a time when enterprises are rapidly moving from AI experimentation to production deployment. FriendliAI is addressing this shift with its advanced inference platform, which accelerates model inference and reduces GPU costs by up to 90% while maintaining model accuracy.
The new capital will be used to expand FriendliAI’s go-to-market presence across North America and Asia, strengthen R&D to enhance its AI inference stack, and scale GPU infrastructure to support growing customer demand.
“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.”
As enterprises scale their AI systems, inference has emerged as a critical bottleneck, with industry data showing that up to 90% of LLM operational time is spent on inference. FriendliAI directly addresses this challenge by reducing infrastructure costs, delivering industry-leading response times, and simplifying deployment of large models across environments.
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FriendliAI’s impact is already evident across its customer base. The platform supports more than 430,000 Hugging Face models, enabling one-click deployment for developers. In partnership with LG AI Research, FriendliAI recently introduced API access to EXAONE 4.0, the research group’s most advanced large language model. Startups such as Scatter Lab are realizing major cost reductions, while companies like Upstage rely on FriendliAI to deliver state-of-the-art inference performance for their flagship models.
“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.”
With backing from world-class investors and a growing base of enterprise customers, FriendliAI is positioned to play a pivotal role in powering the next generation of AI deployment at scale.