US AI startup Baseten has raised $300 million in growth capital at a valuation of $5 billion. The investment round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund that focuses on late-stage investments.
Chipmaker Nvidia also participated and reportedly contributed around $150 million. This was reported by SiliconANGLE based on coverage by The Wall Street Journal.
Baseten builds infrastructure to run AI models in production environments. The company focuses specifically on inference, where a trained model is actually used to generate predictions or answers. As more organizations deploy AI applications, there is a growing need for reliable, scalable infrastructure to run these models with low latency and high availability.
Baseten’s platform removes much of the complexity normally associated with implementing machine learning models. Instead of configuring the infrastructure themselves, teams can deploy models with minimal configuration through Baseten. The system automatically manages the necessary resources and optimizes, among other things, execution on GPUs in different cloud environments.
In addition to running models, the platform offers management and monitoring features. Teams can track performance, manage releases, and deploy updates without having to develop separate tools. Baseten therefore explicitly focuses on organizations that want to use AI in their core processes but do not want or cannot build their own infrastructure team.
The importance of inference platforms is growing
Nvidia’s investment is noteworthy because the chipmaker is increasingly active in software and infrastructure companies that support inference. As the market shifts from training large models to deploying them efficiently, the importance of inference platforms is rapidly increasing. At the same time, Nvidia is once again investing in a company that uses its own hardware, raising questions about the chipmaker’s role in the broader AI ecosystem.
With this new funding, Baseten aims to further evolve its platform and meet the growing demand for production-ready AI infrastructure. Prior to this round, the company had already raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, and Bond Capital.