According to Beating AI, Wafer, an AI inference startup with only 8 employees, has completed a $40 million Series A funding round, valuing the company at over $200 million. The company had previously rejected acquisition offers from several cloud vendors and inference service providers.

Wafer's inference business achieved an ARR of $8 million in about three months. It doesn't manufacture chips; instead, it helps models run faster and cheaper on existing chips. Wafer allows its AI Agent to automatically adjust the model, inference engine, kernel, cache, quantization, and scheduling, finding the optimal solution for different hardware such as NVIDIA and AMD. Previously, much of this work required manual tuning by inference performance engineers; Wafer aims to delegate this to AI.

In Wafer's own testing, GLM 5.2 running on an AMD MI355X achieved approximately 80% of the throughput of an NVIDIA B200, at less than half the cost. Current customers include Vercel and Inworld AI. Vercel has also independently published tests, stating that Wafer running GLM 5.2 achieves approximately twice the throughput of other serverless providers.

After securing funding, Wafer immediately began expanding its workforce. They recently opened positions in four categories: Technology, Growth, CEO's Office, and GTM (Global Management Team), all requiring employees to be based in San Francisco five days a week. The Technology positions offer a base salary of $250,000, plus stock options.

According to BlockBeats, on September 3, sources familiar with the matter revealed that the Bank of Japan is inclined to raise its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points this month to address the risk of rising inflation, while adjusting the pace of future rate hikes flexibly according to the economic and price situation.

Sources familiar with the matter said that Bank of Japan officials will discuss the possibility of raising the policy rate and continue to view inflation risks as tilted to the upside. Rising service prices and the continued weakness of the yen have further strengthened the case for action. Currently, the overall development of the Japanese economy is in line with the Bank of Japan's previous expectations. Since there have been no major changes in the economic situation that would require a significant adjustment to policy, a 50 basis point rate hike is unlikely. One source said this has reduced market expectations for a "significant rate hike." (Jinshi)

According to BlockBeats, on September 3, trader BonkGuy (Unipcs) wrote that MARSCOIN reminded him of SAFEMOON on BNB Chain in 2021, which once had a market value of approximately $17 billion.

BonkGuy believes that MARSCOIN has a stronger current narrative, combining multiple popular concepts such as Musk, CZ, Mars, and SpaceX, and has become one of the important targets in the BNB Chain Meme track.

Driven by increased market attention, MarsCoin, the Meme coin of the BNB Chain ecosystem, has surpassed $110 million in market capitalization, according to GMGN data. Its current market capitalization is $105 million, representing a 41.7% increase in the last 24 hours.