Baseten, the company building the infrastructure behind some of the fastest-growing AI applications, has announced a $150 million Series D funding round, valuing the company at $2.15 billion. The round was led by BOND with participation from CapitalG, Premji, Kevin and Elizabeth Weil of Scribble, as well as continued support from Conviction, 01a, IVP, Spark, and Greylock. This new infusion brings Baseten’s total funding to over $285 million, a milestone that underscores how critical inference infrastructure has become to the broader AI economy.
The heart of Baseten’s pitch lies in inference—the process of running AI models in real-world applications at scale. Just as the cloud became the indispensable foundation for the last generation of internet companies, inference is shaping up to be the cornerstone for AI-native businesses. Inference revenue is inherently tied to every AI application, and with the market already exceeding $100 billion and growing rapidly, Baseten is positioning itself as the essential utility provider for this new wave of growth. Customers ranging from Abridge in healthcare to Clay in go-to-market software to OpenEvidence in medical information delivery are already relying on Baseten to handle billions of inference calls per week, translating into billions of dollars of downstream revenue.
CEO and co-founder Tuhin Srivastava framed it directly: “Every breakout AI application depends on fast, reliable, and cost-effective inference, the same way the last 15 years of companies depended on the cloud. Baseten makes that possible. In the same way Stripe became an index of the internet economy, Baseten will become an index of the AI economy.” The comparison to Stripe is deliberate—Stripe built the transaction rails for the internet, and Baseten is building the inference rails for AI. This model positions them not as a niche infrastructure provider, but as a core layer of the emerging AI stack.
What differentiates Baseten’s offering is its Inference Stack, a platform that combines applied research, flexible infrastructure, and developer tooling. For companies like Clay, this means faster launches and more reliable customer-facing AI experiences. For healthcare startups like Abridge and OpenEvidence, it means life-critical scalability and trustworthiness, with Baseten supporting millions of clinical notes and high-stakes medical queries weekly. Investors see this as a signal that inference is not just a technical bottleneck but a fundamental enabler. Jay Simons of BOND compared Baseten’s trajectory to Atlassian’s rise, noting that the company is “years ahead in both product and adoption.”
The timing of this round aligns with Baseten’s recent product expansions. With the launch of Model APIs and Baseten Training, the company now enables developers not only to deploy models quickly but also to fine-tune them for performance and quality. These capabilities integrate with their Inference Stack to allow multiple models to operate together, creating seamless AI-powered experiences without compromising speed or cost-efficiency. This is where the company is doubling down—using the Series D capital to scale research into model performance, expand infrastructure, and invest heavily in customer success teams.
The broader implication is clear: inference is the new battleground of AI infrastructure, and Baseten has staked its claim. While hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure will continue to compete for general compute, Baseten is carving out a specialized domain focused on high-performance, cost-optimized inference at scale. If the company succeeds, it will sit at the center of the AI economy much like Stripe did for online payments, creating a layer that nearly every fast-scaling AI application touches. For investors and customers alike, this fundraise is not just about Baseten’s growth, but about validating inference as the critical infrastructure layer of the AI age.
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