Announcing Baseten’s $75M Series C

We founded Baseten in 2019 to help builders bring the power of AI into every product. We believed AI was the next big thing back then, but deploying models into production was a massive challenge due to the lack of the right tooling. My co-founders and I experienced that pain firsthand throughout our careers. That’s why we set out to build the inference infrastructure, workflows, and tools necessary to bring AI to life at scale.

Fast forward to today and everything is accelerating faster than we could have imagined. AI has become the dominant force on the world stage, and every company has realized that it must become an AI company to survive. Even since our Series B just a year ago there have been huge changes in the market. 

Reasoning models have taken the main stage, the gap between closed and open-source models has evaporated, and companies are increasingly waking up to the reality that inference is the biggest challenge left to solve.  

But today's models are bigger, faster, and far more complex than ever. You need the best possible software, tooling and knowledge to deliver world-class product experiences. We think about inference as three interweaving problem areas:

1. Applied model performance research
Modern AI demands that models run at peak efficiency on every chip. Extracting maximum speed, quality, and reliability requires cutting-edge techniques like speculative decoding paired with knowledge of the latest hardware. This isn’t just about making models fast; it’s about squeezing out every ounce of performance for every model modality across a constantly evolving hardware space.

2. Elastically scaling infrastructure
It’s not enough to optimize for a single chip. Our systems must scale reliably across thousands of nodes, regions, and clouds. Delivering consistent, mission-critical performance is a monumental infrastructure challenge. Whether for compliance, cost, or performance reasons, organizations need complete control over where and how their workloads run.

3. Model management and observability
Traditional DevOps and CI/CD workflows aren’t built for the unique demands of AI. Today, we need specialized tools that provide deep observability and control to manage AI deployments and ensure reliability. This means building systems that monitor performance and make complex model workflows for systems like compound AI transparent and resilient.

Doubling down on our mission

Today, we’re thrilled to announce our Series C fundraise. We want to thank our investors for their continued support. The round was co-led by IVP and Spark, with continued participation from Greylock, Conviction, South Park Commons, Basecase and Lachy Groom. We’re also excited to welcome Adam Bain and Dick Costolo of 01a as new investors. With this funding, we’re doubling down on our mission: building the world’s best inference platform for mission-critical AI workloads.

This investment will allow us to:

• Invest heavily in R&D: Build on the dozens of new features and releases we’ve launched over the past year, like Chains for compound AI, self-hosted and hybrid deployments, and numerous performance improvements to keep pushing the limits of what’s possible.

• Expand geographically: Bring our platform closer to you with more global deployment partners, region-aware and region-locked deployments, and local B10ers to support you.

• Grow our team: Bring in the best talent to build our product, support our customers, and drive our business forward with smart, fun, and humble people who share our vision.

Shaping the future of AI together

✕

In 2024, we were incredibly fortunate to work with some of the fastest-growing AI companies, including Abridge, Bland, Descript, Gamma, Writer, and many more. Today, we run workloads across thousands of GPUs, serving millions of end customers worldwide while continuously adding new cloud partners to ensure you get the most flexible deployment options possible.

Our customer base has grown exponentially, and our platform has evolved dramatically. Every new feature and performance improvement is designed to empower you to build AI solutions that are fast, reliable, and scalable.

Get started and join us

We’re always looking for smart, fun, and motivated people to join us, so please get in touch if you think you might be a fit. And if you’re a developer ready to build with Baseten, browse our model library and documentation to get started, or reach out if you’d like a personalized tour.

Now’s the time to build.

Tuhin