AI inference company Baseten has acquired Blaxel, a startup that builds secure execution environments, or sandboxes, for AI agents. Baseten co-founder and chief technology officer Amir Haghighat told Axios Pro about the deal, which the outlet reported first on Thursday. Baseten later announced the acquisition.
Blaxel, a San Francisco startup, builds sandboxes based on microVMs, small isolated virtual machines. Each agent gets its own. According to the release, the sandboxes spin up and resume up to five times faster than competing products. In a joint blog post, the companies said a Blaxel sandbox can suspend and resume in 25 milliseconds. It can also sit idle for months at close to zero cost.
Blaxel's other products include Agent Drive, a distributed filesystem that agents can share, and a networking layer that connects agents to tools, MCP servers, APIs, and other agents. The team has been building the platform for more than 18 months, the post said. With this acquisition, Baseten will add new products based on Blaxel's technology, starting with sandboxes, to expand its support for code execution, tool use, and session persistence.
According to the post, Blaxel will continue to operate, and its product does not change. Over time, Baseten plans to integrate Blaxel's technology with its inference, storage, observability, and enterprise infrastructure. As Baseten's co-founder and chief technology officer Amir Haghighat noted, agents need models, but they also need a secure environment to run in that's fast, scalable, and reliable enough for production.
Paul Sinaï, Blaxel's co-founder and chief executive, said: We started Blaxel because agents need environments designed to work alongside the models powering them. This acquisition is part of Baseten's aggressive expansion, having raised more than $2bn since its founding in 2019. In June, TNW reported that it raised $1.5bn at up to $13bn. The release puts the valuation of that Series F round at $13bn. In December 2025, Baseten acquired Parsed, a reinforcement learning startup.
Baseten's customers include Abridge, Clay, Cursor, Lovable, Mercor, and OpenEvidence, according to the company. With this acquisition, Baseten is poised to further enhance its position in the AI market, particularly in areas like answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, by providing more secure and efficient environments for AI agents to operate.
Este artigo foi escrito com a assistência de IA.
News Factory APP - notícias agênticas para impulsionar seu SEO e AEO.