Baseten, the AI inference company powering the world’s most advanced AI applications, today announced a $1.5 billion Series F financing led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, and Spark Capital. Sands Capital and Wellington Management also participated as co-leads, with IVP, Greylock, 01A, Blackbird, Durable Capital Partners, Verified Capital, Battery Ventures, and D. E. Shaw Ventures also contributing significant investment along with existing investors. The round includes investments made across two tranches at $13 billion and $11 billion respectively, and reflects surging demand for inference at the app layer as closed source and open source models converge in capability, cost and customization.
The economics of AI are shifting fast. Post-trained open source models are increasingly delivering frontier-level performance at a fraction of the cost, and leading app layer companies now direct 30 to 50 percent of model spend toward custom and post-trained models. The fastest-growing companies building in AI increasingly rely on Baseten’s platform to power a multi-model strategy, combining frontier models with custom, post-trained models optimized for specific workflows and use cases – at any scale and without lock-in.
Baseten is growing at a rate that reflects the urgency of the inference market. Revenue has grown approximately 20x year-over-year and the platform now processes more than 1 billion inference calls every day – across 87 clusters globally and spanning 18 clouds, a multi-cloud architecture that is itself a core part of what customers are buying.
“The future of AI will be built on millions of specialized models, and the companies building the best ones know that post-training has become existential. It’s how they build intelligence they own, on data that’s theirs, optimized for the customers they serve. The companies closing this loop fastest are using Baseten to build a system that compounds in value over time,” said Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and Co-founder of Baseten. “We’re grateful to our investors for their conviction that Baseten is where that future gets built, and to the team and customers who’ve made us worthy of it.”
The capital from this round will go toward talent, compute, and accelerating enterprise go-to-market. Baseten is tripling headcount this year to keep pace with that demand, investing in the engineering, research, operations and go-to-market (GTM) teams that will define the next chapter of the business.
“Tuhin and the Baseten team made a bet six years ago that most people weren’t ready to make: that the future of AI would be built on many specialized models, and that the companies building them would need world-class infrastructure to make them real. That bet is paying off in a way that is hard to overstate. The inference market is compounding faster than almost anything we’ve seen, and some of the most sophisticated AI companies in the world are standardizing on Baseten to power it. What we see in Baseten is rare: a company growing at this speed, with this level of customer trust, building infrastructure the entire ecosystem depends on. We are proud to deepen our partnership with this team.” – Apoorv Agrawal, Partner, Altimeter Capital
About Baseten
Baseten is the inference company behind a new generation of AI products. The company builds systems software that runs the entire workload for AI applications—from GPUs and autoscaling to observability, billing, and developer tools—so teams can focus on models and user experience instead of infrastructure. Baseten’s customers include leading AI companies such as Abridge, Clay, Cursor, Lovable, Mercor, and OpenEvidence and others building specialized models for their domains. Founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, Baseten has raised over $2 billion to date from investors including Altimeter Capital, Battery Ventures, Blackbird, BOND, CapitalG, Durable Capital Partners, Greylock, IVP, NVIDIA, Sands Capital, Spark Capital, Verified Capital, Wellington Management, 01A and others.
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