AI Startup Baseten Raises $75 Million Amid DeepSeek's Emergence

Baseten, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company, has raised $75 million in Series B funding, the company announced on Wednesday. The round was led by IVP and Spark Capital, with participation from existing investors Greylock, South Park Commons, Lachy Groom, and Base Case. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.

Founded in 2019, Baseten provides a platform to run machine learning workloads in the cloud of users. Its native workflows serve large models in production so users don’t need to think about version management, roll-out, and observability. Companies like Descript, Picnic Health, Writer, Patreon, Loop, and Robust Intelligence use it to power core machine learning workloads.

The funding round values Baseten at $825 million, demonstrating that venture capitalists believe tech's AI boom stands to benefit a plethora of startups, not just those building large language models. In recent months, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have raised billions in funding, with much of the money going toward servers containing Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs).

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After companies finish training AI models on reams of data, they need to deploy those models somewhere at the inference stage, which is when models generate outputs in response to user queries. That's when Baseten comes in.

Rather than run its own data centers, Baseten runs its software on data center equipment from cloud providers, including Amazon and Google. Customers can supply their own infrastructure with an enterprise tier. By drawing from multiple providers, Baseten offers access to more GPUs than a single cloud's current supply.

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The company recently added:
- Multi-cloud support so that customer workloads can span across multiple clouds and regions.
- Integrations with best-in-class runtimes like TensorRT.
- Partnerships with AWS and GCP, so customers can access the best hardware and don’t need to spend months negotiating for compute from cloud providers.
- An optimization engine to make sure workloads are running as performantly as possible.



In the next quarter, they’ll be adding more clouds (and GPUs), a brand new orchestration layer (think build pipelines, queues, etc.), and an optimization engine to make sure workloads are running as performantly as possible.

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04/03/2024
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From a competitive standpoint, Baseten's approach offers several advantages. By leveraging cloud-based infrastructure, multi-cloud support, and a focus on enterprise customers, Baseten can provide a more reliable and cost-effective AI solution. This allows the company to compete with larger tech firms that may have more resources but lack the same level of flexibility and adaptability.

Moreover, Baseten's support for open-source models like DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model enables the company to cater to a broader range of customers, including those with more limited budgets. This support for open-source models also provides an additional revenue stream through customization and optimization services.

In conclusion, Baseten's latest funding round is a testament to the growing demand for AI infrastructure solutions and the company's ability to adapt and innovate in response to emerging technologies like DeepSeek. With its strong team, backing, and focus on enterprise customers, Baseten is well-positioned to continue its growth and success in the AI market.