Baseten Is Helping Companies Ditch Million-Dollar AI Bills

In 2019, when Baseten was founded, AI and machine learning were already at hype, but few could have predicted just how fast things would evolve. Large models were still a niche pursuit, inference was an afterthought, and the conversation around AI revolved more around research breakthroughs than real-world deployment. Fast forward to 2024, and AI models are not only mainstream but are also driving billion-dollar investments, shifting how businesses operate and compete.

On Wednesday, the company announced a new $75 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $825 million. The round was led by existing investors IVP and Spark Capital, with participation from others. The investment signals that venture capitalists see significant value in infrastructure companies that allow enterprises to run AI efficiently—without the hassle of securing scarce GPUs or dealing with the unpredictability of cloud providers.

The Inference Problem That No One Saw Coming

For years, training AI models received most of the attention. Companies poured resources into gathering data and fine-tuning models, but once those models were trained, a new challenge emerged getting them to run efficiently at scale.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, it reshaped user expectations overnight. AI systems were now expected to deliver real-time responses, and any delay became unacceptable. The launch of Stable Diffusion was another defining moment being open-source, it catalyzed an entire ecosystem around customizable AI models. As a result, inference quickly became the industry's biggest bottleneck.