Baseten Raises $300M at a $5B Valuation to Power a Multi-Model Future

via Business Wire

IVP, CapitalG, and NVIDIA anchor the round as inference becomes the defining infrastructure layer for AI.

Baseten, the AI inference company chosen by the new wave of category-defining AI applications, today announced a $300 million financing with IVP, CapitalG, and NVIDIA as anchor investors. This values Baseten at $5 billion and marks the company’s third fundraise in the past year, reflecting the boom in demand for high-performance infrastructure that can reliably run modern AI models in production.

With six years of building toward this moment, Baseten has become the inference platform behind many of the AI products reshaping how people work and build software, including companies such as Cursor, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Notion, Clay and many others.

"Baseten lets us run the models we need, the way we need to run them,” says Shiv Rao, Co-founder & CEO of Abridge. “The performance is best-in-class, but what sets them apart is everything else: the reliability, the developer experience, the fact that they're constantly finding ways to lower our costs. They're a partner, not a vendor.”

Inference as the Defining AI Story of 2026

The AI industry is entering a new phase extremely fast. After years focused on training ever-larger models, the conversation has shifted to inference—the ability for AI models to reason and generate outputs in real time and real workflows. Industry analysts estimate inference will account for two-thirds of all AI compute by the end of 2026, up from one-third in 2023. Baseten’s platform is designed to accelerate this era, enabling customers to run more and more of their own models in production.

"If cloud was the foundation that enabled the last generation of great technology companies, inference is the foundation for the next," says Tuhin Srivastava, co-founder and CEO of Baseten. "Every breakout AI application depends on fast, reliable, and cost-effective inference. We've spent six years building the infrastructure to make that possible—and we’re ready for this next chapter of hundreds and then thousands of new models.”

The investment underscores Baseten's mission to ensure that the future of AI belongs not only to a handful of giant models, but to thousands of specialized models built by companies for their specific customers and use cases.

“Our customers are building precise models for everything from elite software development to medical documentation to high-stakes legal reasoning, and they need a platform that will allow them to deliver deep specificity, expertise, and performance,” says Srivastava. “This is the type of user experience — and the promise of AI — we’re dedicated to making possible.”

Driving a Multi-Model Future

Baseten believes the most exciting AI future is a multi-model ecosystem. As more organizations across sectors build their own custom and domain-specific models, they need an independent, robust inference layer that lets them run those models with strong guardrails, security, and observability, on infrastructure they control.

Baseten makes it possible for companies to own their differentiation and their IP. The company’s runtimes are open rather than tied to proprietary weights, there is no lock-in around customer models, and its infrastructure is built with multi-cloud flexibility to optimize for reliability and cost. This combination of performance, reliability, and developer experience is why fast-growing AI companies are standardizing on Baseten as they scale.

“Baseten is quickly becoming default infrastructure,” says investor Sarah Guo, General Partner at Conviction. “In a world where every ambitious AI team wants to run many models and fully own its IP, Baseten gives them the freedom, reliability, and economics to do that at scale. That combination—open runtimes, multi-cloud resilience, and a deeply considered developer experience—is the new standard the best companies expect.”

About Baseten

Baseten is the inference company behind a new generation of AI products. The company builds systems software that runs the entire workload for AI applications—from GPUs and autoscaling to observability, billing, and developer tools—so teams can focus on models and user experience instead of infrastructure. Baseten’s customers include leading AI companies such as Cursor, Mercor, Clay, OpenEvidence, Lovable, Abridge and others building specialized models for their domains. Founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, Baseten has raised $585 million to date from investors including IVP, CapitalG, Conviction, Bond, Greylock, and Spark Capital.

“In a world where every ambitious AI team wants to run many models and fully own its IP, Baseten gives them the freedom, reliability, and economics to do that at scale."

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