Artificial intelligence inference startup Baseten Labs Inc. has raised $300 million in new funding on a $5 billion valuation.

The round was co-led by Institutional Venture Partners LP and CapitalG LP, Google LLC’s independent growth fund, with Nvidia Corp. reportedly also participating with a $150 million investment.

Founded in 2019, Baseten is an AI infrastructure company that specializes in making it easier for teams to deploy and run machine learning models in real-world applications. The company’s platform is focused on AI inference, the process of running a trained machine learning model in production to generate predictions, decisions or outputs from new, real-world data.

Baseten offers an inference infrastructure stack that consists of tooling, orchestration software and optimized runtime environments that allow companies to avoid building their own from scratch. Using the stack, engineers and machine learning teams can deploy models with minimal configuration and access application programming interfaces that deliver predictions to end users.

The company’s platform is architected to maintain consistently low latency and high availability, even under load, by automatically allocating resources and optimizing execution paths across hardware such as GPUs in multiple cloud environments.

Baseten also offers tools for workflow management, versioning, observability and deployment automation that allow teams to track model performance, roll out updates and monitor usage in production without building custom infrastructure.

The platform supports open-source models and integrates with standard machine learning frameworks to give developers flexibility in choosing models and workflows that best fit their needs.

The participation of Nvidia in the round was particularly notable. The Wall Street Journal said it highlights Nvidia’s “increasingly aggressive push into startups focused on inference — the process of AI models generating output in response to prompts — as the industry shifts its focus from training models to powering them at scale.” It’s also another case of Nvidia investing in a customer of its AI chips, which has raised some concerns.

Coming into the new funding round, Baseten had raised $285 million over five rounds, according to data from Tracxn. Previous rounds included $40 million in March 2024, $75 million in February and $150 million in September.

Previous investors in Baseten include Bond Capital Management LP, Premji Invest Ltd., Conviction Capital, 01 Advisors, Greylock Partners, Spark Capital Management and BoxGroup.

Photo: Baseten