Wafer raises $40M Series A

Marathon and Chemistry co-led the round, with Wing, AMD Ventures and Outset Capital participating. Existing backers Fifty Years and Y Combinator also put in more money. Angels include Jeff Dean, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch and Cloudflare's Matthew Prince. Secondary reports put the valuation above $200 million. Wafer did not state that figure in the announcement text reviewed here.

The round followed a $4M seed by about four and a half months. Press accounts say the team has eight people and reached $8M in annual recurring revenue within three months. Vercel and Inworld AI are named customers, and gross margins run near 50% because accelerator capacity is rented. The company says its agents tune the model, engine, kernels and hardware together. In July tests, AMD's MI355X reached roughly 80% of Nvidia B200 throughput at under half the cost on some models.

For AI builders, inference cost is increasingly the main margin lever, and a startup with eight staff drew this much capital by selling performance per dollar. AMD's participation signals that hardware vendors will pay to close the software gap. The 50% gross margin shows that optimization vendors still carry heavy compute costs, so buyers should compare quoted savings against the vendor's own pricing.