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.
