Baseten hires ex‑Databricks lead
Baseten just hired Sameer Paranjpye as Head of Engineering — he’s an ex‑founder and former Databricks VP of Engineering, brought in to scale teams and product. The hire, plus Baseten’s SF billboard marketing and recent customer mentions, signals a push to expand engineering capacity and GTM muscle right now. (baseten.co (x.com)
Baseten’s “Welcome Sameer Paranjpye” post was published March 23, 2026 on the company blog. (baseten.co) Sameer’s Databricks author page lists posts including “Databricks Bengaluru: Scaling Innovation” (Apr 7, 2025) and “Project Lightspeed” (Jun 28, 2022), documenting engineering leadership and platform work while at Databricks. (databricks.com) Baseten closed a $75 million Series C in February 2025 and announced a $300 million Series E on January 23, 2026 that values the company at $5 billion. (baseten.co) The company has deployed cryptic, engineer‑targeted billboards across San Francisco with slogans like “Own your models” and “Own Your SLAs,” and Baseten’s head of marketing Mike Bilodeau described the campaign as “if‑you‑know‑you‑know” while Outfront Media data shows SF billboard rental revenue rose roughly 30% between 2023 and 2025. (kawc.org) Baseten’s Series E announcement names customers such as Cursor, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Notion and Clay, and Baseten’s customer pages include case studies — for example, Rime moved to Baseten for compliance‑sensitive speech synthesis and cites new customer deals after switching. (businesswire.com) An NVIDIA case study says Baseten adopted NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs on Google Cloud and reported up to 5× higher throughput for high‑traffic endpoints, up to 38% faster LLM serving latency, and the ability to provision thousands of GPUs from its multi‑cloud pool in under five minutes. (nvidia.com)
