Baseten, a leader in AI infrastructure, announced the successful completion of a $150 million Series D funding round to accelerate the development of performant, reliable, and cost-efficient inference for AI applications. The round was led by BOND, with Jay Simons joining Baseten’s Board of Directors. New investors Conviction (Sarah Guo) and CapitalG (Jill Chase) also participated, alongside continued support from 01A, IVP, Spark, Greylock, Scribble Ventures, BoxGroup, and Premji Invest.
Baseten’s team has been focused on artificial intelligence for over 15 years, pioneering advances in machine learning from early factorization and ensemble models in competitions such as the Netflix Challenge to experimentation with OpenAI Gym. Over the years, the company explored high-impact AI applications, from disease progression prediction and fraud detection to generative art, ultimately seeking to build scalable AI infrastructure that could serve production-ready models.
Between 2019 and 2022, Baseten observed limited adoption of large-scale model serving, or inference, as teams focused primarily on feature stores, interpretability, and experimentation. The company maintained its conviction that AI products would eventually require fast, reliable, and flexible model-serving infrastructure, and strategically developed for that future with three core principles: fast models, interchangeable compute, and flexible, open, and Pythonic runtimes.
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The market shifted dramatically in late 2022 with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the growing adoption of open-source models such as Stable Diffusion and Whisper. These developments highlighted the need for scalable inference, transparency, and cost control, driving rapid adoption of AI applications across industries. Baseten positioned itself to meet this growing demand by providing high-performance infrastructure capable of running models quickly, reliably, and at scale.
“After more than six years building, we are uniquely positioned to solve today’s AI scaled inference problem,” said Baseten. “Our early investments in optimizing kernels, cold-starts, and cloud integration have resulted in the fastest, most flexible, and reliable inference infrastructure available. In 95% of head-to-head bakeoffs, we beat competitors by 40-50% in performance, and our infrastructure maintains many 9s of uptime across ten different clouds.”
Baseten’s platform empowers dynamic AI companies including Abridge, OpenEvidence, Clay, Mirage, Zed, Gamma, Sourcegraph, Writer, and Bland, enabling them to deliver high-value applications to hundreds of millions of users. By providing reliable, performant infrastructure, Baseten allows customers to focus on innovation rather than operational constraints.
The newly raised Series D funding will enable Baseten to expand its product offerings, accelerate hiring, and support the growing adoption of AI applications across industries. “This capital gives us the resources to pursue what we believe is the largest opportunity yet as AI becomes embedded in every part of our lives,” said the company.
