Nvidia reportedly invested $150 million in artificial intelligence (AI) inference startup Baseten.
The investment is part of $300 million Baseten raised in a funding round that doubled the startup’s valuation to $5 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. reported Tuesday January 20, citing anonymous sources.
Contacted by PYMNTS, an Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on the report.
Baseten did not immediately respond to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
According to the WSJ report, Nvidia’s investment in Baseten is part of a larger inference initiative that has seen the company license inference technology from Groqcommits to investing up to $100 billion in OpenAIand takes stakes in dozens of small companies that develop technologies for AI applications.
When the company obtained a license inference Groq technology in December, an Nvidia spokesperson told PYMNTS: “We have obtained a non-exclusive license to Groq’s intellectual property and have hired talented engineers from the Groq team to join us in our mission to deliver cutting-edge accelerated computing technology.
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For Baseten, the latest funding round is the company’s third in the last 12 months, according to Tuesday’s WSJ report.
Baseten announced an investment of $75 million C Series in May and 150 million dollars D Series in September.
The Series D round nearly tripled the company’s valuation from where it was six months earlier, bringing it to $2.15 billion.
During the Series D announcement, Baseten CEO and co-founder Tuhin Srivastava written in a blog post that the company powers applications that reach hundreds of millions of users and provides AI companies with the infrastructure they need to “take performance and reliability for granted.”
“This capital gives us the resources to exploit what we believe to be the greatest opportunity yet, as AI becomes integrated into every aspect of our lives,” Srivastava wrote.
For businesses to access an AI-powered future, they will likely need infrastructure This removes the complexity of orchestrating the model, allowing them to focus on their differentiators, Srivastava told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview published in September.
“Every organization in the world is either going to turn to AI or use it,” Srivastava said. “As companies move toward this, you really only have one competitive advantage. That advantage is speed. And when it comes to speed, you can only move quickly if you delegate tasks that aren’t critical to you.”