The brief was simple: make Baseten synonymous with inference. Baseten = Inference. The company was already powering some of the most ambitious AI products in the market, but inference was quickly becoming a crowded, noisy space. The job wasn’t to explain every layer of AI infrastructure. It was to make one connection impossible to miss.

To their credit, the client understood the assignment. Baseten made a huge investment in San Francisco OOH and media, including a takeover of the Embarcadero. If you took the train from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you learned the word inference, whether you knew what it meant or not. And for the technorati, it hit hard. “Inference is everything.” “Inference isn’t for tourists.” “Inference is yummy?” WTF? We wrote hundreds of unhinged lines. No one else in AI looked or talked like Baseten. The repetition, scale, and attitude made the category feel like theirs.

Mission accomplished. Baseten has gone from fighting for recognition in inference to becoming one of the companies defining it. In June 2026, the company raised $1.5 billion at a $13 billion valuation after growing revenue 20x and inference volume 40x in a year. Today, Baseten powers companies including Cursor, Notion, Harvey, HubSpot, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Decagon, and Lovable. In the inference wars, Baseten has become the default choice for AI inference at scale.