Baseten is finalising a $1.5bn funding round that values the company at up to $13bn.
The structure is almost as notable as the size. The round is dual-tiered, with some investors buying in at an $11bn valuation and others at $13bn, according to the company via the Wall Street Journal. It is a tactic a number of AI startups have used lately to lift a headline number. The financing is co-led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management.
Baseten sells the unglamorous part of the AI stack. The San Francisco company, founded in 2019, provides the software and computing capacity businesses need to run inference, the step where a trained model actually answers a query. It rents capacity from around 20 cloud providers and layers its own inference software on top, so customers can deploy and fine-tune models on their own data.
Much of that work runs on cheaper, open-source models rather than the frontier systems from OpenAI or Anthropic. That is the whole bet. “Open-source models are getting very, very good,” chief executive Tuhin Srivastava told the WSJ, adding that customers increasingly mix open and proprietary models depending on how hard the task is.
