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StreamLake vs Wafer
Both sell access for coding agents. StreamLake offers Kuaishou's closed KAT-Coder from China; Wafer offers agent-tuned open models billed per token.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
StreamLake vs Wafer: key differences
The pitch overlaps more than it first appears. StreamLake sells KAT-Coder-Pro V2.5, a proprietary coding model from Kuaishou's KwaiKAT team that StreamLake says was trained with large-scale agentic reinforcement learning for repository-level work. Developers pay per token or buy a KwaiKAT Coding Plan, with a Claude-protocol proxy for Claude Code or OpenClaw. Wafer sells big open models, like GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, on stacks its agents tune, billed per token through APIs that plug into Claude Code, Cline and OpenHands.
Model type and region split them. StreamLake's model is closed and in-house, and its data residency in China rules it out for many US and EU buyers. Wafer is a young San Francisco company with a small catalog, and its reported 2x to 2.8x speedups are measured against stock vLLM or SGLang. Wafer also runs on NVIDIA or AMD and sells dedicated deployments tuned to a latency SLO. StreamLake sells bare metal to Chinese internet businesses.
What StreamLake and Wafer do
StreamLake
StreamLake is the AI cloud brand of Kuaishou, the Chinese short-video company behind the Kling video models. It sells model-as-a-service inference and bare-metal compute to internet businesses, drawing on the infrastructure Kuaishou built to serve video at massive scale. Its developer site offers APIs, SDKs and integration guides aimed at taking teams from testing to production, and its Vanchin platform also hosts third-party open models from DeepSeek and GLM, most recently DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017.
Example models: KAT-Coder-Pro V2.5, KAT-Coder-Air V2.5
Full StreamLake profileWafer
Wafer builds AI agents that act as GPU performance engineers, then sells inference on the stacks those agents tune. The company came out of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch as a "Cursor for CUDA" that turned slow PyTorch into custom kernels. Founders Emilio Andere and Steven Arellano are based in San Francisco. Wafer raised a $4M seed led by Fifty Years in April 2026 and a $40M Series A co-led by Marathon and Chemistry in September 2026 at a $220M post-money valuation, with AMD Ventures and Wing joining. Its agents profile a workload, generate candidate configs across batching, decoding, quantization, engines, kernels and hardware, measure each one and deploy the winner.
Example models: GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
Full Wafer profileShould you choose StreamLake or Wafer?
StreamLake
Choose StreamLake for
- Teams that want Kuaishou's purpose-built coding model
- Chinese businesses needing domestic MaaS and bare metal
- A KwaiKAT Coding Plan subscription
Wafer
Choose Wafer for
- Western teams wanting tuned open models per token
- Dedicated endpoints tuned to a latency target
- Hedging GPU supply across NVIDIA and AMD
StreamLake vs Wafer at a glance
| Attribute | StreamLake | Wafer |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Proprietary coding models, plus hosted open models | Open weights |
| Flagship models | KAT-Coder-Pro V2.5, KAT-Coder-Air V2.5 | GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash |
| Speed | Unknown | ~168 tok/s on GLM-5.3; 2–2.8x vs stock vLLM or SGLang (vendor) |
| Price | $0.74 in, $2.96 out (Pro V2.5), or KwaiKAT Coding Plan | Per token, prepaid credits |
| Customization | Unknown | Agent-tuned dedicated deployments |
| Deployment | MaaS API, bare metal | Serverless, dedicated |
| Long context | 256K | Up to 1M (GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between StreamLake and Wafer?
Both sell access for coding agents. StreamLake offers Kuaishou's closed KAT-Coder from China; Wafer offers agent-tuned open models billed per token.
When should I choose StreamLake over Wafer?
Teams that want Kuaishou's purpose-built coding model; Chinese businesses needing domestic MaaS and bare metal; A KwaiKAT Coding Plan subscription.
When should I choose Wafer over StreamLake?
Western teams wanting tuned open models per token; Dedicated endpoints tuned to a latency target; Hedging GPU supply across NVIDIA and AMD.
Is StreamLake or Wafer cheaper?
StreamLake: $0.74 in, $2.96 out (Pro V2.5), or KwaiKAT Coding Plan. Wafer: Per token, prepaid credits. The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Which has more context, StreamLake or Wafer?
StreamLake: 256K. Wafer: Up to 1M (GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash).
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If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious. Our inference stack treats a long-horizon trace as the primary workload, so speed, cost, and accuracy hold up deep into the trace.