Baseten vs Fireworks AI

Baseten — Infrastructure · Private · $13B valuation · 4 of 4 figures sourced  |  Fireworks AI — Infrastructure · Private · $17.5B valuation · 4 of 4 figures sourced

Both run on DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Llama.

Relationship

Contrary Research profile.

3 of 3 capabilitiesShared product typeSame scale bandSourced competitorServe a model in production

3 of 3 capabilities — Shares model hosting, model inference and model training.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship API service and model API.

Ludbee product records

Same scale band — Both late-stage private.

Ludbee scale bands · from valuation and funding figures

Sourced competitor — “Fireworks AI's closest competitors are managed inference companies such as Together AI and Baseten.”

research.contrary.com · checked 2026-09-19

Serve a model in production — Rivals on this job — Run a trained model behind an API at scale — hosted endpoints, GPU capacity, routing, and the cost and latency trade that comes with them.

Ludbee needs vocabulary · the scope on the sourced edge

Aligned comparison

FieldBasetenFireworks AI
Valuation$13B$17.5B Fireworks AI has 35% more
Employees250115 Fireworks AI has 2.2× fewer
Founded20192022 3 yrs later
StatusPrivatePrivate match
CategoryInfrastructureInfrastructure match
Stack layerAPI service, Infrastructure service, Model API, PlatformAPI service, Model API
HeadquartersSan Francisco, USASan Mateo, USA

Capability overlap

Shared · 3

Model hostingModel inferenceModel training

Not verified for Baseten · 2

Agent orchestrationSpeech to text

Recorded for Fireworks AI. Baseten’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Baseten has no capability Fireworks AI lacks, among the 3 recorded here.

Products, side by side

Hand-checked pairing

Baseten

API service

Baseten Frontier GatewayAPI service

Production-grade API launch platform for model labs: takes a lab's model from research to a reliable, scalable, white-labelled API in days, distinct from Baseten's Distribution Platform (model marketplace listing).

Model API

Baseten Model APIsModel API

Pre-optimised hosted endpoints for open-source frontier models, called without deploying or managing a deployment first.

Fireworks AI

API service

Fireworks InferenceAPI service

Serving for frontier open models and for a customer's own post-trained versions of them, on an inference engine tuned at each layer.

Fireworks Speech RecognitionAPI service

Real-time and batch speech-to-text on Fireworks, aimed at voice workflows that need low-latency transcription at scale.

Fireworks TrainingAPI service

Training and retraining of custom models on Fireworks, offered across several training surfaces and served on the same platform.

Model API

Fireworks AIModel API

Hosted API for serving and fine-tuning open-weight models, billed per token.

Fireworks NexusModel API

Drop-in API endpoint that routes each request across models to trade cost against quality.

No counterpart

Baseten sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Fireworks AI yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

Platform

BasetenPlatform

Deploys and serves machine-learning models as production endpoints on managed GPU infrastructure.

Baseten TrainingPlatform

Trains and fine-tunes models with reinforcement learning through the Loops SDK, deploying the result onto Baseten's inference stack.

Infrastructure service

Baseten Inference RuntimeInfrastructure service

Named inference runtime (automatic TensorRT/SGLang/vLLM builds, speculative decoding, custom kernel fusion, KV-cache optimisation) that underlies Baseten's Dedicated Inference, Model APIs and Training products.

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