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.
Chip manufacturer Nvidia also joined in and is said to have contributed approximately $150 million. This was reported by SiliconANGLE based on coverage by The Wall Street Journal.
Baseten builds infrastructure for running AI models in production environments. The company focuses specifically on inference, the moment when a trained model is actually used to generate predictions or answers. As more and more organizations roll out AI applications, there is a growing need for reliable and scalable infrastructure to run those models with low latency and high availability.
Baseten’s platform removes much of the complexity normally associated with operationalizing machine learning models. Instead of setting up infrastructure themselves, teams can roll out models with minimal configuration via Baseten. The system automatically manages the necessary resources and optimizes execution across GPUs in different cloud environments, among other things.
In addition to executing models, the platform offers management and monitoring functionality. Teams can track performance, manage versions, and roll out updates without having to develop separate tooling. Baseten thus focuses explicitly on organizations that want to use AI in their core processes but do not want to or cannot build their own infrastructure team.
Importance of inference platforms is increasing
Nvidia’s investment is notable because the chip manufacturer is becoming 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 the new funding, Baseten aims to further scale its platform and respond to the growing demand for production-ready AI infrastructure. Prior to this round, the company had already raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors such as Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, and Bond Capital.