Baseten Closes on $75 Million Series C

Baseten has closed a $75 million Series C funding round co-led by IVP and Spark Capital, with additional participation from Greylock, Conviction, South Park Commons, 01 Advisors, and Lachy Groom. This round brings Baseten’s total funding to $135 million.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, Baseten provides AI inference infrastructure that enables companies to deploy and run AI models efficiently in real-world applications.

AI inference is the process of running a trained machine learning model on new data to generate predictions, classifications, or outputs in real time. Unlike training, which involves teaching the model by processing large datasets and adjusting parameters, inference applies learned patterns to unseen inputs to produce actionable results.

Inference becomes challenging with complex models, such as deep neural networks, which require significant processing power. Factors like model size, hardware availability, and response time constraints impact inference performance. Companies like Baseten address these challenges by providing infrastructure that streamlines inference, optimizing cost, speed, and reliability for AI-powered applications across various industries.

For example, a healthcare company using AI to transcribe doctor-patient conversations needs a system that can process and analyze speech in real-time. Instead of building and maintaining complex infrastructure themselves, they can use Baseten’s platform to host and manage their AI model. Baseten ensures the model runs smoothly, scales automatically to handle high demand, and processes audio quickly without delays. This allows the healthcare company to focus on improving its AI application while Baseten handles performance, reliability, and cost optimization.

Over the past twelve months, Baseten has recorded a fivefold increase in usage, maintained 99.999% uptime, and achieved over 60% better performance than competitors in throughput and latency metrics.

Customers of Baseten include Writer (AI-powered business writing), Descript (audio and video editing software with AI transcription), Gamma (AI-powered presentation and document creation tool), and Abridge (AI-driven medical transcription and documentation platform).

“Baseten has continually focused on making AI inference performant, reliable, scalable, and multicloud,” said Sarah Guo, a general partner and founder at Conviction. “Their growth is being driven by their offering of a 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.”

Baseten has also expanded its team threefold over the past year, now comprising 50 employees from organizations such as GitHub, Google, Uber, Amazon, Palantir, Atlassian, Confluent, Yelp, and AirTable.

“Our customers prioritize bringing high-quality products to market quickly, and they choose us to help make that happen,” said Tuhin Srivastava, the CEO and co-founder of Baseten. “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.”

“Anyone building an AI product that isn’t worried about inference hasn’t hit real scale yet,” said Will Reed, a general partner at Spark Capital. “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.”

Spark Capital, established in 2005 and based in Boston, Massachusetts, invests in early and growth-stage companies across media, entertainment, and technology sectors. Their latest fund, Spark Capital VII, raised $800 million and closed in 2024.

IVP, founded in 1980 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializes in later-stage venture capital investments, focusing on rapidly growing technology companies across sectors like enterprise infrastructure, consumer, and fintech. Their most recent fund, IVP XVII, closed at $1.8 billion in 2023.