In some sense, Baseten started with building blocks—literally.
“So, I grew up in Australia,” said Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and cofounder of AI inference unicorn Baseten. “And, in Australia, you learn to count with these ‘base ten’ blocks. They’re the building blocks of how you count, how you operate.”
Years after his days of stacking yellow and green blocks in the classroom, Srivastava now spends his time playing with a very different set of building blocks. The Baseten CEO and cofounders Amir Haghighat, Philip Howes, and Pankaj Gupta provide the infrastructure that AI models run on. It’s a classic “picks and shovels” business that, right in the middle of a rollicking AI boom, is helping companies deploy, manage, and scale AI applications.
Or, to use Srivastava’s analogy, the company is laying “the train tracks so the models can run.” The trains that run on Baseten’s tracks can be anything—from large language models to AI models that generate video or that turn voice into text.
Srivastava told
Fortune that Baseten’s revenue has grown by “more than 10x” over the last 12 months, and the company’s big-name customers include Abridge, OpenEvidence, Clay, Patreon, and Writer. Now, six months after raising a $75 million Series C, Baseten is re-upping with a $150 million Series D,
Fortune has exclusively learned. The deal, which almost triples Baseten’s valuation to $2.15 billion, was led by Bond, with participation from new investors including CapitalG, Premji, and Scribble as well as existing investors Conviction, 01a, IVP, Spark, and Greylock.
Baseten focuses on the inference side of AI—the process by which trained AI models use their knowledge to generate predictions and decisions.
“Inference will be one of the biggest markets in AI,” said Sarah Guo, Conviction founder and an early Baseten investor, via email. “It has become clear that open source AI and custom models are here to stay. The ongoing struggles of research labs to provide performance, scale and reliability in the face of massive demand shows just how technically hard this problem is, and Baseten has the leading product and most sophisticated, stickiest and happiest customers in the category.”
In his role at Baseten, Srivastava has a front seat to the state of the AI application layer, and he says it’s moving as fast as conventional wisdom states, “very dynamic, very savvy, kind of no sunk cost, and off to the races very, very quickly.”
“The biggest challenge [and] opportunity are the same: rapid growth,” said Jay Simons, Bond general partner, via email. “Growing and scaling as quickly as they are is a challenge for any company… Baseten carries an incredible amount of responsibility for its customers… It’s a critical service that needs to be absolutely bullet-proof.”
What happens if the AI wave crashes? I asked Jill Chase, CapitalG partner.
“It’s not like they need tons of unique companies building AI products, which I think there will be,” said Chase. “But even if there weren’t, all AI is pegged to inference, which is usage of AI products. I think that’s a bet everyone is very comfortable making—that AI usage will continue to grow massively over time, even if it’s consolidated to three or hits three billion customers.”
There’s certainly precedent for startups growing into behemoths by serving other startups (take
Stripe, for example). The question, of course, is how big this market ultimately is. Srivastava’s placed his bets.
“We think AI applications are just the last great market,” he said. “This will be bigger than anything we’ve ever seen… We think that’s the end state of the world from a technology perspective, at least as far as we see it… We want to be the index [for that economic growth]. If the market as a whole wins, we win”
In short, Srivastava believes that the building blocks, the foundation, will hold.
See you Monday,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinksEmail: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.comSubmit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter
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