The next era of AI will be defined by what companies can build with intelligence that is open, flexible, and their own. That requires a new infrastructure stack — one that lets teams take the frontier and turn it into products, workflows, and customer experiences that are uniquely theirs. That’s what we’re building at Baseten.
Today we’re welcoming Sheila Vashee, as Baseten’s Chief Marketing Officer to help us build towards that vision. Sheila brings more than two decades of experience scaling products that people love, leading marketing and growth teams at Figma, Opendoor, and Dropbox.
I asked Sheila a few questions about why Baseten, what our customers need, and what she’s most excited about.
What drew you to this market?
Sheila: This is an incredible moment in AI. The open frontier is moving fast, and companies now have access to an expanding universe of models they can choose from and optimize for performance, speed, and cost through intelligence they own. Baseten sits right at the center of that shift, helping companies bring the best of the open ecosystem into their products.
Baseten’s customers are the leaders in AI and are building the future across industries. OpenEvidence enables over half of the doctors in the US by surfacing clinical knowledge that helps them make faster, more informed decisions for patients. Harvey helps legal teams research, analyze, and draft more efficiently so lawyers can spend more time with their clients. And Cursor helps software teams write, understand, and ship code faster, so developers can spend more time building. We’re proud to partner closely with these companies and build for their needs.
What do enterprises need from AI?
Sheila: The most sophisticated companies won’t just want to own their intelligence. They’ll want control over the full stack around it.
That means choosing the right models for different tasks, running them reliably at scale, and continuously turning advances in inference, post-training, and execution into better products. That system can get complicated quickly. Baseten abstracts away that complexity and gives teams one platform for all the infrastructure around their intelligence.
What excites you most about joining?
Sheila: Three things: the opportunity, the customer love, and the team.
We’re still so early in AI adoption across industries, and already the scale of what’s ahead is staggering. Companies are only beginning to understand what intelligence can unlock, and Baseten has been steadily building the infrastructure to make that possible.
You can see that in how much our customers love working with the team. People here work side by side with customers, understand their hardest problems, and help them build. That level of customer obsession is rare and at the core of every great company.
And then there’s the team: thoughtful, hardworking, deeply technical, and genuinely fun to be around. The people are the special sauce.
Looking ahead
Baseten will be the intelligence infrastructure stack powering the next generation of great companies. I’m excited to have Sheila here to help build it.
— Tuhin
