Powering companies like Writer, Descript, Abridge and Gamma, Baseten has grown over 5x year-over-year with 99.999 percent uptime and averaging over 60% better performance than competitors on throughput and latency metrics

SAN FRANCISCO: Baseten, the leading inference platform for AI-native products, announced the closing of a $75 million Series C round of funding co-led by IVP and Spark with additional participation from Greylock, Conviction, South Park Commons, 01 Advisors and Lachy Groom. The news brings the company’s total funding to $135 million and follows a year of hypergrowth that saw Baseten become the preferred platform of companies building AI-powered products. The funds will support product, team and geographic expansion.

As AI investment surges, companies are increasingly integrating models as native components in their products. These products depend on effective model performance, which requires inference—the process of querying a model and receiving a result—to be fast, reliable, and high quality. Scaling inference for custom, fine-tuned, or advanced open-source models has become the foremost challenge facing AI builders, draining developer resources and delaying time to market. Even well-funded organizations frequently encounter downtime or inflated costs when production inference fails to meet these requirements.

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

Running inference at scale is both the hardest and most critical challenge for turning AI into a product, and Baseten combines software, expertise, and research to deliver on this need. The company provides everything required to run a production-grade AI-native product, spanning:

• Model Tooling and Workflows for deploying, managing, scaling and observing models in production to ensure model performance and accelerate iteration cycles.
• Multi-cluster, Multi-cloud Infrastructure that automatically scales across every environment, region and model modality with maximum performance and reliability.
• Applied Performance Research that uses the latest techniques and frameworks to improve model performance and cost-efficiency without sacrificing output quality.
• Embedded AI Engineers that leverage deep understanding of deploying and scaling AI-native products to accelerate customer time-to-market and provide 24/7 support.

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

“The Baseten team’s relentless focus and execution have been key to attracting some of the biggest names in AI as customers, like Abridge, Gamma and Writer,” said Shravan Narayen, Partner at IVP. “As new AI-native startups emerge and enterprises scale Gen AI into production, the need for Baseten’s fast, reliable inference platform will only grow.”

The news follows on a series of key milestones for the company. To support its growth, its team has grown three times year-over-year to 50 people hailing from companies like GitHub, Google, Uber, Amazon, Palantir, Atlassian, Confluent, Yelp and AirTable. Additionally, it has continued to consistently push into production product features like multi-cloud support, multi-cluster support, hybrid cloud support, integrations with runtimes like TensorRT and partnerships with AWS and GCP to unlock access to the best hardware.

“Baseten has continually focused on making AI inference performant, reliable, scalable, and multicloud,” said Sarah Guo, General Partner and Founder at Conviction. “Their growth is being driven by their offering of a best in class, 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.”

About Baseten

Baseten is the leader in infrastructure software for high-scale AI products, offering the industry's most powerful AI inference platform. Committed to delivering exceptional performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency, Baseten is on a mission to help the next great AI products scale. Top-tier investors, including IVP, Spark, Greylock, Conviction, Base Case, and South Park Commons back Baseten. Learn more at Baseten.co

Fonte: Business Wire