Baseten raises $1.5 billion as AI inference demand surges

Baseten closed a $1.5 billion funding round that valued the California-based startup at $13 billion, a sharp sign that money is still pouring into the infrastructure layer of artificial intelligence. The deal was led by Sands Capital and Wellington Management, while Blackbird VC said its commitment may be the firm’s biggest ever.

The round lands as the market shifts from training giant models to running them efficiently in production. Baseten builds software and infrastructure for inference, the stage where trained models generate real-world outputs, and says that over the past year its revenue grew 20-fold while inference volume increased 40-fold. The company has positioned itself as a lower-cost alternative to larger providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, with a pitch centered on speed, reliability and lower operating costs.

Baseten’s platform is aimed at customers that need open-source, custom and fine-tuned models to work inside products where intelligence is part of the core user experience. The company says its system supports dedicated inference for high-scale workloads, pre-optimized model APIs and training tools that connect directly to deployment. It also says it offers SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA- and GDPR-compliant deployment options, and dedicated, self-hosted and hybrid setups, features that help it sell into regulated enterprise environments.

The customer list gives a sense of where demand is coming from. Baseten says companies including Cursor, Notion, Lovable, Harvey, HubSpot, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Decagon and Parallel use its platform, a roster that spans coding, productivity, legal, health and business software. Baseten’s customer materials say the commercial case is straightforward: lower latency and lower cost in production AI.

The company, founded in 2019 by Australians Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat and Philip Howes, has been repriced aggressively as investor appetite for AI infrastructure has expanded. Baseten raised a $75 million Series C in February 2025, a $150 million Series D at a $2.15 billion valuation in September 2025, and a $300 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation in January 2026. The new round is its fourth capital raise in 18 months.

Baseten said it will use the latest funding to expand computing capacity, software and hiring. That spending is part of a broader contest inside the AI market, where investors are no longer only chasing model makers but also the costly systems needed to deploy those models at scale. For now, Baseten stands as a test of whether durable enterprise demand can justify a premium valuation, or whether the company is simply the latest beneficiary of fear that the next bottleneck winner is already being priced in.