AI inference startup Baseten hits $5 billion valuation with $300 million round backed by Nvidia

Artificial intelligence inference startup Baseten Labs Inc. has raised $300 million in new funding at a $5 billion valuation.

The round was co-led by Institutional Venture Partners LP and CapitalG LP, Google LLC’s independent growth fund, with Nvidia Corp. reportedly participating with a $150 million investment.

Founded in 2019, Baseten is an AI infrastructure company focused on making it easy for teams to deploy and run machine learning models in real-world applications. The company’s platform focuses on AI inference, the process of running trained machine learning models in production to generate predictions, decisions, or outputs from new real-world data.

Baseten provides an inference infrastructure stack of tools, orchestration software, and an optimized runtime environment that eliminates the need for companies to build their own from scratch. This stack gives engineers and machine learning teams access to an application programming interface to deploy models and deliver predictions to end users with minimal configuration.

The company’s platform is designed to maintain consistently low latency and high availability even under load by automatically allocating resources and optimizing execution paths across hardware, including GPUs, across multiple cloud environments.

Baseten also provides tools for workflow management, version control, observability, and deployment automation. This allows teams to track model performance, deploy updates, and monitor usage in production without building custom infrastructure.

The platform supports open source models and integrates with standard machine learning frameworks, giving developers the flexibility to choose the models and workflows that best fit their needs.

Nvidia’s participation in this round was particularly noteworthy. The Wall Street Journal noted that NVIDIA is “increasingly committed to startups focused on inference (the process by which AI models generate output in response to prompts) as the industry shifts its focus from training models to driving them at scale.” This is also another case of Nvidia investing in its AI chip customers, raising some concerns.

Baseten has participated in new funding rounds, raising $285 million in five rounds, according to Tracxn data. Previous rounds included $40 million in March 2024, $75 million in February and $150 million in September.

Previous investors in Baseten include Bond Capital Management LP, Premji Invest Ltd., Conviction Capital, 01 Advisors, Greylock Partners, Spark Capital Management and BoxGroup.

Photo: Base Ten