Paris-based Weflayr has closed a $2.5 million pre-seed round led by 13books Capital, with participation from Founders Future, Kima Ventures, Plug and Play, Station F Ventures, General Catalyst scout Roxanne Varza and a group of angel investors.
The startup aims to give AI companies full control over how they evaluate, select and route AI models. While hundreds of models now compete on quality, speed and cost, most companies rely on only a few, as traditional AI gateways route requests without knowing how models perform on specific workloads. Weflayr instead benchmarks models against a customer’s own production data, lets teams approve trusted models and set routing rules, and matches each request to similar previously benchmarked calls. It also links inference decisions to costs and margins across customers and features.
Its first deployment cut inference costs by more than 55% at equivalent quality and delivered 15 percentage points higher relative quality at the same cost compared with a frontier model.
Weflayr was founded by Romain Mazeries, former CEO of Mangopay, and Noé Achache, former Head of AI Engineering at Theodo Data & AI. Mike McFadgen, Partner at 13books Capital, said AI inference is becoming critical infrastructure and that an independent intelligence layer presents a major opportunity.
The funding will expand engineering and AI research teams and support growth across Europe and the U.S.
Featured image: Credit: Weflayr
