We raised most of the capital before we had any traction. We raised on a rolling basis and had millions in the bank before we had even published the open-source repository. Ultimately we raised based on the team's background + vision.

The ~1% figure might be outdated today but it was a best-effort estimate a couple of months ago. TensorZero powered tens of trillions of inference tokens per month. TensorZero is not widely used but it was used by a couple of extreme-scale users.

Thank you, appreciate the response. It’s a great part of the HN community that there’s almost always someone around with the first-hand experience and facts.

Best of luck with whatever you do next!