Baseten nabs $300M from IVP, CapitalG to challenge Together AI in inference
- ByStartupStory | January 23, 2026
San Francisco-based Baseten, a startup that helps companies run artificial intelligence models in real-world apps, has just closed a major funding round. According to sources, investors invested $300 million in the company, pushing its valuation to about $5 billion, nearly double its previous level.
A funding round led by venture capital firm IVP and Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG. NVIDIA also participated in the investment, contributing $150 million to the deal.
The new funding is expected to be allocated toward growing the team, particularly in engineering and customer service; enhancing the platform to accommodate a larger customer base and increased workloads; and developing more comprehensive integrations with cloud services and enterprise software.
Providing AI infrastructure for model deployment
Baseten was founded in 2019 by Tuhin Srivastava (CEO), Amir Haghighat (CTO), Philip Howes (Chief Scientist), and Pankaj Gupta. With over 15 years of experience in machine learning, the US company helps businesses run advanced AI models, whether they are open-source or proprietary, with strong performance and flexibility.
The platform is built on three main features: high-performance runtimes for low latency and high throughput, interchangeable compute across regions and cloud providers for resilience and cost savings, and user-friendly Python tools that give developers control over their AI systems.
Many well-known AI companies, including Abridge, Sourcegraph, Writer, and Gamma, work with Baseten, which delivers significantly better performance and higher uptime through a distributed, multi-cloud system.
Unlike Together AI, Weights & Biases (W&B), Cortex, Paperspace, and OctoML, Baseten focuses on production-grade, low-latency serving with seamless multi-cloud portability and developer-first tools.
What do investors think?
The AI market has shifted focus from just training large models to deploying them efficiently and affordably. Baseten’s software is key to this process. Investors view this part of AI infrastructure as essential as the hardware that supports it.
On the other hand, the chip manufacturing giant is not just investing money; it also provides hardware and software tools that help Baseten manage AI workloads.
This partnership indicates Nvidia’s intention to broaden its influence beyond hardware to include the tools needed for real-world AI operations.
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