GabrielBianconi

Thanks, appreciate the follow-up. It's certainly still to be determined if OSS AI infra will pan out, but I hope it does!

Our investors aren't looking for safe, they're looking for a small chance in funding the next Databricks or similar. Most times it doesn't work out unfortunately, but that's part of the game.

(Also, we raised the capital in 2024 and didn't burn most of it.)

Thanks, that's exactly what happened.

The title is misleading unfortunately but that's how social media goes...

Our team was much smaller. We didn't spend all the capital.

It's pretty common. If a startup winds down before it runs out of money, it typically returns whatever is left to the investors. We didn't have any debt.

Thanks!

See my sibling comment

There are many factors at play here but if I had to pick one... an open-source company has to find product market fit twice: first for the OSS project and again for a commercial product. The AI market moves very quickly so it's easy to take a step in the wrong direction and fall behind.

I might publish a long-form reflection when the dust settles.

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The ~1% figure might be outdated today but it was a best-effort estimate a couple of months ago.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.

Yeah exactly. We didn't spend the majority of it.

Mostly salaries to support a small team.

We are returning the remaining capital to investors.

Turns out I was wrong :)

Seed was in '24 actually but we only announced in '25.

We raised in 2024 and only burned through ~$3m of it, mostly on salaries to support a small team.

This was coincidental. Someone reported the issue last week, we fixed it, and published the advisory.