Baseten is raising $1.5 billion at a valuation of up to $13 billion, as enterprises increasingly adopt lower-cost open-source AI models and invest in inference infrastructure that makes them practical at scale.
Baseten is finalising a $1.5 billion funding round that values the AI inference startup at up to $13 billion, underscoring growing investor confidence in open-source AI models as a viable alternative to expensive frontier systems.
The company’s core thesis is that open-source models have matured to the point where many enterprise workloads no longer require proprietary offerings from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Chief Executive Officer Tuhin Srivastava said, “Open-source models are getting very, very good,” noting that customers increasingly combine open and proprietary models depending on task complexity.
The funding round includes investments at both $11 billion and $13 billion valuations and is co-led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management.
Founded in 2019, Baseten provides inference software, computing capacity, model deployment tools, and fine-tuning capabilities. The company rents infrastructure from about 20 cloud providers and layers its own software on top, enabling businesses to deploy AI models on proprietary datasets.
Rather than building foundation models, Baseten is betting that AI profits will increasingly come from efficient, low-cost inference. The strategy appears to be resonating with customers including Cursor, Mercor, and OpenEvidence, with some reportedly reducing costs significantly by shifting workloads to open-source models. One customer is said to run a task at roughly 30% of the cost of a proprietary alternative.
The company’s valuation has surged from about $2.15 billion in September 2025 and $5 billion in January 2026. Investors are effectively wagering that accelerating open-source AI adoption and the growing importance of inference infrastructure will allow companies such as Baseten to capture increasing value as AI pricing continues to fall.
