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

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

The round was co-led by Institutional Venture Partners LP and CapitalG LP, the independent growth fund of Google LLC, along with Nvidia Corp. would have is also participating with an investment of $150 million.

Founded in 2019, Baseten is an AI infrastructure company specializing in making it easier 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 a trained machine learning model in production to generate predictions, decisions or outcomes from new real-world data.

Baseten offers an inference infrastructure stack consisting of tools, orchestration software, and optimized runtime environments that allow companies to avoid building their own from scratch. Using the stack, engineers and machine learning teams can deploy models with minimal configuration and access application programming interfaces that provide predictions to end users.

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 on hardware such as GPUs across multiple cloud environments.

Baseten also offers workflow management, release management, observability, and deployment automation tools that allow teams to track model performance, deploy updates, and monitor production usage without building custom infrastructure.

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

Nvidia’s participation in the round was particularly notable. The Wall Street Journal said it highlights Nvidia’s “increasingly aggressive push toward startups focused on inference — the process by which AI models generate results in response to prompts — as the industry focuses more on training models to power them at scale.” This is also another case of Nvidia investing in a customer of its AI chips, which has sparked some concern.

Before the new funding round, Baseten had raised $285 million in five rounds, data shows from Tracxn. Previous rounds included $40 million in March 2024$75 million in February and 150 million dollars 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: Baseten