Investors are about to wager hundreds of millions on a startup with very little revenue, betting that AI is hot enough to turn an open-source codebase into a thriving business. Spun out of UC Berkeley from the lab of Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica, vLLM has in recent weeks been pitching investors on raising money to commercialize a popular open source codebase that speeds up large language models, and squeezes better performance out of AI chips. Four sources have independently told Forbes that vLLM’s co-leader Simon Mo has been taking meetings around Silicon Valley looking to raise $60 million now and at least $100 million in a second tranche. Mo did not respond to a request for comment.

Source: Forbes December 26, 2025 06:48 UTC