Baseten just pulled in a massive $150 million Series D, vaulting the AI infrastructure startup to a $2.15 billion valuation and cementing its place as one of the most important players in the race to scale inference — the behind-the-scenes compute that makes AI apps actually run.
If the last generation of great tech companies was built on the cloud, the next wave is being built on inference. Every time you ask a chatbot a question, generate an image, or tap into an AI-powered workflow, inference is happening under the hood. Baseten wants to be the go-to platform for that process — a kind of “Stripe for AI”.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Tuhin Srivastava, describes inference as the foundational layer of the modern AI economy. His pitch is simple: the better and cheaper the inference infrastructure, the more powerful the AI products that can be built on top.
Rapid growth, rapid funding
This round nearly triples Baseten’s valuation in just six months since its last raise. The startup has now raised more than $285 million in total, with backers ranging from top venture firms to corporate growth funds.
Who’s building on Baseten
The platform is already serving high-volume workloads:
- Healthcare: powering billions of fine-tuned LLM calls each week for medical teams.
- Sales and productivity: helping companies like Clay and Writer roll out new AI capabilities faster and at scale.
For customers, Baseten isn’t just infrastructure — it’s the difference between shipping new AI features in weeks instead of months.
Clay’s CEO, Kareem Amin, says:
“We launch new AI capabilities faster, with higher quality… Baseten isn’t just infrastructure for us, it’s a critical piece of how we deliver the next generation of AI-powered GTM.”
What’s next
With fresh capital, Baseten plans to:
- Expand developer tools
- Boost infrastructure reliability
- Push the limits of model performance
- Grow its customer success and support teams
The bottom line
AI apps don’t work without inference. As generative AI moves deeper into everyday products, Baseten is positioning itself as the invisible backbone of the industry — the layer that will quietly power billions in future revenue.
