News
AI startup Baseten seeks $1.5B as valuation nears $13B
Baseten is reportedly seeking $1.5 billion in fresh funding at a valuation that could reach $13 billion. The discussions follow a major financing round completed earlier this year and reflect continuing investor interest in AI infrastructure, a sector benefiting from growing enterprise demand for artificial intelligence services.
AI startup Baseten is in talks to secure up to $1.5 billion in new investment which would value the company at $11 billion to $13 billion. These talks come months after San Francisco-based startup announced raising a $300 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation in January.
Baseten is among many AI infrastructure startups that have captured investor interest to run a specific type of AI called artificial intelligence inference. Inference, or generating responses and performing actions from an AI that has been trained on information, is used across virtually any AI-driven product and has become a major area of focus in technology investment as many companies adopt the tech.
Revenue Growth Has Attracted Notice
Sources familiar with the discussions say that Baseten's annualized revenue has grown from about $200 million to nearly $600 million from early in the first quarter of 2026 to the end of it, putting the San Francisco firm among a group of AI infrastructure providers with notable investment prospects.
Founded in 2019, Baseten aids enterprises in running AI models across the cloud, having raised a round of funding in the past that included Nvidia, CapitalG, and IVP. That latest funding round doubled Baseten's valuation from the $2.15 billion recorded in September 2025.
Baseten has received about $585 million in funding prior to current reported fundraising talks.
AI Investments Accelerate
These reported talks are occurring while overall investment in AI infrastructure is booming worldwide. According to International Data Corporation's (IDC) latest Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Spending Guide, the U.S. will contribute the largest share of a projected $632 billion spent globally on AI by 2028. The second-largest AI market in the world is China, while Western Europe is continuously investing more in artificial intelligence technologies.
For Australian businesses, increasing demand for AI infrastructure can mean an appetite for compute power, model deployment solutions, and enterprise AI services.
In the United States, investors are primarily investing capital in companies that can support the ongoing operations of AI versus those that create the AI models.
The reported financing talks haven't been publicly confirmed by Baseten, and terms may change.
Source: TechCrunch
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