AI Inference Startup Baseten Reaches $5 Billion Valuation in $300 Million Nvidia-Backed Funding Round

AI inference startup Baseten Labs has secured $300 million in a new funding round, achieving a valuation of $5 billion.

The round was co-led by Institutional Venture Partners LP and CapitalG LP, Google's independent growth fund, with participation from Nvidia, which reportedly invested $150 million.

Founded in 2019, Baseten is an AI infrastructure company focused on simplifying the deployment and operation of machine learning models for practical applications. Its platform specializes in AI inference, the process of running trained models in production to generate predictions, decisions, or outputs from new, real-world data.

Baseten offers a comprehensive inference infrastructure suite, including tools, orchestration software, and optimized runtime environments, enabling companies to bypass the need to build their own systems from scratch. Using this infrastructure, engineers and ML teams can deploy models with minimal configuration and access APIs to deliver predictions to end-users.

The platform is engineered to deliver consistently low latency and high availability, even under load, through automated resource allocation and optimized execution paths across hardware like GPUs in multi-cloud environments.

Baseten also provides workflow management, version control, observability, and deployment automation tools, allowing teams to track model performance, roll out updates, and monitor production usage without constructing custom infrastructure.

The platform supports open-source models and integrates with standard machine learning frameworks, offering developers flexibility in choosing the most suitable models and workflows for their needs.

Nvidia's involvement in this round is particularly noteworthy. The Wall Street Journal noted it highlights Nvidia's "increasingly aggressive push" into startups in the inference space—the process where AI models generate outputs in response to prompts—as industry focus shifts from training models to running them at scale. This is another instance of Nvidia investing in its AI chip customers, a strategy that has raised some concerns.

Prior to this new funding round, Baseten had raised $285 million across five previous rounds, according to Tracxn data. Previous rounds included a $40 million round in March 2024, a $75 million round in February, and a $150 million round the preceding September.