NVIDIA has deepened its push into AI infrastructure by investing $150 million in San Francisco–based Baseten, as part of a $300 million funding round that values the company at $5 billion. The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, underscoring growing investor confidence in platforms that enable large-scale AI inference as enterprises move from experimentation to production deployment.
Founded in 2019, Baseten has emerged as a key player in helping companies operationalize large language models and other AI systems in real-world environments. Its customers include fast-growing technology firms such as Cursor and Notion, which rely on the platform to deploy, manage, and scale AI models efficiently in production. Co-founder and CEO Tuhin Srivastava has described Baseten’s ambition as building the “AWS for inference,” positioning the company as foundational infrastructure for the next phase of AI adoption.
Baseten’s platform is tightly optimized for NVIDIA’s latest-generation GPUs, including the H100 and B200 chips, allowing enterprises to run high-performance inference workloads with greater efficiency and reliability. For NVIDIA, the investment strengthens its broader ecosystem by ensuring that advanced hardware is paired with software platforms capable of translating raw compute power into scalable, production-ready AI services.
As the AI market matures, attention is increasingly shifting toward inference—the process of running trained models at scale—rather than just model training. Baseten has capitalized on this shift by focusing on performance, cost efficiency, and ease of deployment, helping organizations bring AI features into products faster while managing operational complexity.
A key driver of Baseten’s developer adoption has been Truss, its open-source framework designed to simplify model packaging, deployment, and scaling. Truss allows teams to standardize how models move from development to production, reducing friction and accelerating time to market. This open-source approach has helped Baseten build strong credibility among developers while anchoring its commercial platform.
With fresh capital in hand, Baseten is expected to expand its engineering teams, enhance platform capabilities, and scale its global footprint. NVIDIA’s participation not only validates Baseten’s technology but also signals the growing strategic importance of inference infrastructure as AI becomes embedded across enterprise software, productivity tools, and consumer applications.
