Sierra Ventures: Our Investment in FriendliAI

AI Inference Infrastructure

As large language models move from research labs into real-world applications, inference is becoming the real bottleneck for enterprise AI. Serving these models efficiently, cost-effectively, and at scale is one of the most urgent infrastructure challenges of this era.

FriendliAI is solving it with unmatched technical rigor and strategic clarity.

Founded by Byung-Gon Chun, the inventor of Continuous Batching, FriendliAI is pioneering a new standard in model serving. Their core innovation, known as Iteration Batching, significantly improves GPU utilization by enabling continuous work across multiple requests. This results in higher throughput, lower latency, and significant cost savings compared to leading open-source approaches.  

What makes FriendliAI stand out is not just performance. It is their focused approach to delivering the best performance-per-dollar experience on standard NVIDIA GPUs. Rather than chasing custom silicon or proprietary stacks, Friendli is purpose-built for the ecosystem most enterprises already use. This pragmatic focus makes them a compelling choice for companies seeking to integrate generative AI into their operations.

The product suite is also designed with adoption in mind. Developers can start with pay-as-you-go serverless endpoints, then scale to dedicated infrastructure, and eventually deploy fully managed containers inside secure enterprise environments. FriendliAI's integration with Hugging Face has opened the door to 390,000+ models, making it easy for teams to test, deploy, and scale their AI workloads with minimal friction.

With a strong customer base spanning the US and Korea, a growing set of enterprise deployments, and a product that consistently wins in head-to-head comparisons, FriendliAI is quickly gaining ground as the most developer-friendly and production-ready inference platform. Their momentum is amplified by deep technical credibility, regional advantages in APAC, and a fast-growing market that is expected to surpass $250 billion by 2030.

We believe FriendliAI is building a core layer of the AI infrastructure stack and are proud to support their journey.

Follow FriendliAI on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/friendliai/posts