Baseten, a leading inference platform for AI-native products, announced the closing of a $75 million Series C round of funding co-led by IVP and Spark with additional participation from Greylock, Conviction, South Park Commons, 01 Advisors, and Lachy Groom.
This brings the company’s total funding to $135 million and follows a year of hypergrowth that saw Baseten become the preferred platform of companies building AI-based products. The funds will support product, team, and geographic expansion.
With AI investment surges, companies increasingly integrate models as native components in their products. And these products depend on effective model performance, which requires inference—the process of querying a model and receiving a result—to be fast, reliable, and high quality. Scaling inference for custom, fine-tuned, or advanced open-source models has become the foremost challenge facing AI builders, draining developer resources and delaying time to market. Even well-funded organizations frequently encounter downtime or inflated costs when production inference fails to meet these requirements.
Running inference at scale is the hardest and most critical challenge for turning AI into a product, and Baseten combines software, expertise, and research to deliver on this need. The company provides everything required to run a production-grade AI-native product, spanning:
— Model Tooling and Workflows for deploying, managing, scaling and observing models in production to ensure model performance and accelerate iteration cycles.
— Multi-cluster, Multi-cloud Infrastructure that automatically scales across every environment, region and model modality with maximum performance and reliability.
— Applied Performance Research that uses the latest techniques and frameworks to improve model performance and cost-efficiency without sacrificing output quality.
— Embedded AI Engineers that leverage deep understanding of deploying and scaling AI-native products to accelerate customer time-to-market and provide 24/7 support.
The news follows on a series of key milestones for the company. And to support its growth, its team has grown 3x year-over-year to 50 people hailing from companies like GitHub, Google, Uber, Amazon, Palantir, Atlassian, Confluent, Yelp, and AirTable. Plus, it has continued consistently pushing into production product features like multi-cloud support, multi-cluster support, hybrid cloud support, integrations with runtimes like TensorRT and partnerships with AWS and GCP to unlock access to the best hardware.
KEY QUOTES:
“Anyone building an AI product that isn’t worried about inference hasn’t hit real scale yet. Every successful AI product needs exceptional inference performance or nobody wants to use it. And when you’re betting the future of your product or your company on that performance, choosing the right partner is make-or-break.”
– Will Reed, General Partner at Spark Capital
“Our customers prioritize bringing high-quality products to market quickly, and they choose us to help make that happen. Speed, reliability, and cost-efficiency are non-negotiables, and that’s where we devote 100 percent of our focus. It’s that dedication—and the trust we’ve built with an incredible group of customers who have collectively raised billions—that has allowed us to grow fivefold in the past year with basically zero churn.”
– Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and cofounder of Baseten
“The Baseten team’s relentless focus and execution have been key to attracting some of the biggest names in AI as customers, like Abridge, Gamma and Writer. As new AI-native startups emerge and enterprises scale Gen AI into production, the need for Baseten’s fast, reliable inference platform will only grow.”
– Shravan Narayen, Partner at IVP
“Baseten has continually focused on making AI inference performant, reliable, scalable, and multicloud. Their growth is being driven by their offering of a best in class, mature product at the right time, accelerated by strong tailwinds: advancing model capabilities, more open source, and increasing interest from companies in shipping production AI applications, fast.”
– Sarah Guo, General Partner and Founder at Conviction
