The AI Boom’s Pricey Middle

Baseten’s talks to raise fresh funding at an $11 billion valuation are the latest sign that investors are betting the messy work of helping developers run AI models can become one of the next big businesses in AI.

That boom has lifted a group of companies including Baseten, Fireworks AI, Together AI and Modal. These startups give customers access to GPU capacity and offer software that makes AI models easier to customize and deploy, and have seen revenue surge recently. The question now is how durable that revenue will be as competition heats up and customers learn to do more of the work themselves.