AI Inference Startup Baseten Targets $13B Valuation in $1.5B Round

SAN FRANCISCO: Baseten is closing in on a massive $1.5 billion funding round at a valuation of up to $13 billion, just five months after its previous raise. The round is being co-led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management.

The new valuation represents a nearly threefold jump from the $5 billion valuation Baseten achieved in January 2026, making it one of the fastest valuation surges in the AI infrastructure space this year. The raise signals strong investor confidence in Baseten’s model inference and AI deployment platform as demand for reliable AI infrastructure continues to accelerate.

The round uses a split-price structure increasingly common across AI mega-rounds in 2026. Some investors enter at an $11 billion valuation while others pay the full $13 billion. The tactic boosts the headline valuation while giving cautious investors a lower entry point.

Baseten builds the software layer that helps companies run AI inference at production scale. The platform rents compute capacity from roughly 20 different cloud providers globally. Customers deploy, fine-tune, and operate models without managing the underlying infrastructure complexity.

Cursor, Mercor, OpenEvidence, Notion, Clay, Abridge, and Lovable rank among its customers. Annualized revenue tripled from $200 million to $600 million in a single recent quarter. Customers shifting to open-source models drive much of the explosive growth pattern.

Open-source models from Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Moonshot now match proprietary alternatives on quality. Baseten customers report inference costs around 30% of closed-source API pricing. The economics reshape how enterprises think about AI deployment at production scale.

Founder Tuhin Srivastava co-founded the company in 2019 alongside Amir Haghighat, Phil Howes, and Pankaj Gupta. Baseten raised a $150 million Series D in September 2025 at $2.15 billion. The January Series E added $300 million from IVP, CapitalG, and Nvidia.

“Open-source models are getting very, very good, and as open-source gets better, we are growing with it,” says Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava.

Fireworks AI reportedly raises at a parallel $15 billion valuation.