The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava

What It Covers

BaseTen CEO Tuhin Srivastava explains how his AI inference company pivoted from serving data scientists with small models to becoming fastest-growing inference provider for production applications.

Key Questions Answered

• •Company pivoting: Stay lean during market shifts - BaseTen remained 18 people from 2019-2023, enabling rapid pivots when ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion created new opportunities without organizational weight.
• •Inference differentiation: Focus on dedicated capacity over shared endpoints - 99% of BaseTen's business serves custom models with dedicated infrastructure, avoiding commoditized shared model serving markets.
• •Technical optimization: Modern LLM inference requires both infrastructure scaling across thousands of GPUs and runtime optimization using frameworks like VLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and SGLang for performance improvements.
• •Market positioning: Open source adoption follows predictable pattern - companies start with Anthropic/OpenAI, then switch to open source models for cost control, reliability, and data privacy.