Nvidia invests $150 million in Baseten as AI industry shifts from training to inference

NVIDIA Invests $150 Million in AI Inference Startup Baseten | AIM

The deal underscores a strategic shift as the AI industry pivots from model training to large-scale deployment. NVIDIA has invested $150 million in AI inference startup Baseten, which has raised $300 million in a funding round valuing the company at $5 billion -- more than double its previous valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported. The round was led by venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners and CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund, with participation from NVIDIA. The deal highlights NVIDIA's aggressive push into inference-focused startups, as the AI industry shifts its attention from training large models to running them efficiently at scale. It also marks another instance of NVIDIA backing a direct customer of its AI chips. Founded in 2019, San Francisco-based Baseten helps companies such as AI code editor Cursor and note-taking platform Notion deploy and operate large language models in production environments. Including the latest raise, the company has now secured $585 million in total funding. Co-founder and chief executive Tuhin Srivastava has described Baseten's ambition as building the "AWS for inference". For NVIDIA, the investment reinforces a strategic pivot championed by chief executive Jensen Huang, who has repeatedly argued that inference will ultimately become a much larger market than model training. As enterprises move from experimentation to full-scale deployment, demand for reliable and cost-efficient inference infrastructure is accelerating, placing companies like Baseten at the centre of this transition. Baseten's platform is optimised for NVIDIA's latest GPU architectures, including the H100 and next-generation B200 chips. By enabling high-performance inference workloads on these GPUs, Baseten effectively extends NVIDIA's ecosystem, helping ensure its hardware remains the default choice as AI adoption spreads across enterprises. CapitalG's participation adds a competitive dimension, given Alphabet's own investments in AI infrastructure and model deployment. Nevertheless, the collaboration underlines the strategic importance of inference, even among industry rivals. At a $5 billion valuation, Baseten now joins a small group of AI infrastructure startups commanding premium multiples. Investors argue that inference platforms are well-positioned to capture long-term value as AI moves beyond Big Tech into sectors such as productivity software, finance and creative tools. Baseten has also gained traction among developers through Truss, its open-source framework that simplifies model deployment. Truss allows teams to package models, manage dependencies and scale inference workloads with minimal friction, an increasingly critical capability as AI features are embedded directly into consumer and enterprise products.

AI inference startup Baseten hits $5B valuation in $300M round backed by Nvidia - SiliconANGLE

AI inference startup Baseten hits $5B valuation in $300M round backed by Nvidia 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.

Nvidia Bets On AI Inference With $150 Million Baseten Stake - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) is betting that the future of artificial intelligence lies not in building bigger models, but in running them more efficiently, ramping up investments in inference as the industry pivots to real-world deployment. The company is backing another fast-growing AI infrastructure startup as investor focus pivots from model training to inference, the process through which AI systems generate outputs in production environments. Backing Baseten's Expansion Baseten, an AI inference startup, raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, more than doubling its prior valuation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. IVP and CapitalG, Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) independent growth fund, led the funding round. As part of the deal, Nvidia is investing $150 million in Baseten. Baseten, founded in 2019, helps companies, including AI coding tool Cursor and note-taking platform Notion, deploy and run large AI models. The company has raised $585 million total, including the new capital. The investment underscores Nvidia's growing focus on inference, the process by which AI models generate outputs at scale, as investor interest shifts beyond model training. Financial Strength and Talent Strategy Nvidia's strong balance sheet supports this strategy, with the company holding $60.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities as of October 26, 2025. Alongside minority investments, Nvidia has pursued acquisitions to unlock value by securing top AI talent amid rising competitive pressure from Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google's in-house chip efforts. The company has been in advanced talks to acquire AI21 Labs in a deal valued between $2 billion and $3 billion, with insiders saying Nvidia's primary interest lies in the startup's roughly 200 highly specialized machine-learning engineers. The potential deal follows Nvidia's recent $20 billion agreement with Groq, which centered on transferring elite talent and gaining access to Groq's language processing unit technology. NVDA Price Action: Nvidia shares were up 0.63% at $179.19 during premarket trading on Wednesday, according to Benzinga Pro data. Photo by Michael Vi via Shutterstock NVDANVIDIA Corp$179.430.76%OverviewGOOGAlphabet Inc$321.24-0.29%GOOGLAlphabet Inc$320.69-0.41%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

AI Inference Startup Baseten Raises $300 Million and Gains Backing From Nvidia | PYMNTS.com

The investment is part of the $300 million raised by Baseten in a funding round that doubled the startup's valuation to $5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (Jan. 20), citing unnamed sources. Reached by PYMNTS, an Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on the report. Baseten did not immediately reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. According to the WSJ report, Nvidia's investment in Baseten is part of a larger push into inference that has seen the company license inference technology from Groq, commit to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, and take stakes in dozens of smaller companies that develop technology for AI apps. When the company licensed inference technology from Groq in December, an Nvidia spokesperson told PYMNTS: "We've taken a non-exclusive license to Groq's IP and have hired engineering talent from Groq's team to join us in our mission to provide world-leading accelerate computing technology." For Baseten, the latest funding round is the company's third in the past 12 months, according to Tuesday's WSJ report. Baseten announced a $75 million Series C in May and a $150 million Series D in September. The Series D round nearly tripled the company's valuation from where it was six months earlier, bringing it to $2.15 billion. When announcing the Series D, Baseten CEO and Co-founder Tuhin Srivastava wrote in a blog post that the company powers applications that reach hundreds of millions of users and provides AI companies with the infrastructure they need to "take performance and reliability for granted." "This capital gives us the resources to pursue what we believe is the largest opportunity yet -- as AI becomes embedded in every part of our lives," Srivastava wrote. For companies to get to the AI-powered future, they will likely need infrastructure that takes away the complexity of model orchestration, allowing them to concentrate on their differentiators, Srivastava told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in September. "Every organization in the world is either going to become AI-first or AI-enabled," Srivastava said. "As companies move toward this, you really only have one competitive advantage. That advantage is speed. And when it comes to speed, you can only move fast if you delegate away stuff that is not core to you."