# Baseten raises $1.5B in new funding round, valuation soars to $13B > Source: > Published: 2026-06-18 15:04:08+00:00 # Baseten raises $1.5B in new funding round, valuation soars to $13B The AI inference startup has tripled its valuation in roughly six months as investors pile into open-source model infrastructure Baseten, the AI inference infrastructure startup, is closing a $1.5 billion funding round that would value the company at up to $13 billion. That is a staggering jump from its $5 billion valuation just six months ago. The round is co-led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management. It is structured in two tiers, with proposed valuations at $11 billion and $13 billion, giving later participants a higher entry price for the privilege of getting in at all. ## From $200M to $600M in revenue, fast Baseten’s annualized revenue run-rate has surged from roughly $200 million to $600 million. Baseten builds software and multi-cloud compute infrastructure that helps companies optimize and customize open-source AI models, handling the inference workloads — the computationally expensive process of actually getting a trained model to produce useful outputs. The company counts Cursor, Mercor, and OpenEvidence among its key customers. At least one Baseten customer has reported achieving up to 30% reduction in costs compared to closed-source alternatives. ## A fundraising year for the ages Baseten’s 2026 fundraising cadence has been relentless. The company closed a $300 million Series E in January at a $5 billion valuation. By May, discussions were already underway to raise nearly $1 billion at an $11 billion pre-money valuation. Now, the round has ballooned to $1.5 billion at up to $13 billion. Before this latest round, cumulative funding for Baseten approached or exceeded $585 million. That figure includes a $150 million Series D completed in September 2025 at approximately $2.15 billion, meaning the company has roughly sextupled its valuation in under a year. Baseten’s pitch is straightforward: open-source models are getting good enough that many enterprises don’t need to pay the premium for proprietary ones. But deploying open-source models efficiently requires specialized infrastructure for model serving and latency optimization. That’s the gap Baseten fills. ## What this means for investors Baseten operates squarely in traditional AI infrastructure with no ties to cryptocurrency or blockchain. At $600 million in annualized revenue, the company is trading at roughly 22 times revenue at the high end of the valuation range. **Disclosure:** This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our [Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).