Baseten raises $1.5B Series F at $13B
The round was priced in two tranches, one at $13B and one at $11B, according to Sacra and Value Add VC. Altimeter, Conviction and Spark Capital led it, with Sands Capital and Wellington Management as co-leads. Blackbird, D.E. Shaw Ventures, Durable Capital, IVP, Verified Capital and 01A also joined. Baseten reports 20x revenue growth and 40x growth in inference volume over the past year. The company plans to spend the money on compute infrastructure, software development and hiring. This is Baseten's fourth raise in about 18 months. Its previous round was a $300M Series E in January 2026 at $5B, led by IVP and CapitalG, with Nvidia putting in $150M. Sources estimate annualized revenue at about $600M. Competitors include Fireworks AI, Together AI and Modal, all private and still raising. Bloomberg and Axios reported in September that investors had approached Baseten about a round near $26B. That report is unconfirmed. For AI founders, inference is attracting capital faster than model training. Baseten bills by GPU-minute and per token, and it pitches cost savings from moving workloads to open-source models. Teams that depend on a single closed-model vendor now have well-funded alternatives. Those alternatives are competing on price, so serving costs for startups should keep falling. Founders building in this layer will be compared against Baseten's growth rate and valuation.