Baseten has raised $1.5 billion in a Series F financing, valuing the San Francisco-based AI inference company at up to $13 billion. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners and Spark Capital, with Sands Capital and Wellington Management participating as co-leads. The financing reflects mounting investor interest in the infrastructure needed to run, customize and scale AI models in production environments.
Series F Financing
The investment includes two pricing tranches, with capital invested at valuations of $13 billion and $11 billion. Battery Ventures, Blackbird, D. E. Shaw Ventures, Durable Capital Partners, Greylock, IVP, Verified Capital and 01A also joined the round alongside existing backers. Baseten said the transaction takes its total funding to more than $2 billion since its founding in 2019.
Demand for AI Inference
The company’s growth has been driven by rising demand for inference, the process through which trained AI models generate responses and complete tasks for users. Baseten reported approximately 20-fold year-over-year revenue growth and said inference volume has expanded 40-fold over the same period. Its platform now handles more than one billion inference calls daily across 87 clusters and 18 cloud environments globally.
Shift Toward Specialized Models
The company argues that enterprises are increasingly building AI systems around proprietary data, internal workflows, evaluation processes and user feedback loops. Rather than relying solely on closed-model APIs, businesses are adopting a mix of frontier models and tailored open-weight models that can be post-trained for specific applications. This approach is gaining traction as open-source models improve in quality while offering greater flexibility, customization and potential cost advantages.
Baseten’s Platform Strategy
Baseten provides the systems software required to deploy and operate AI workloads, covering infrastructure elements such as GPUs, autoscaling, observability, billing and developer tools. Its researchers and engineers also work with customers to optimize and post-train models for domain-specific requirements before serving them at production scale. The company positions this model as a way for AI product teams to focus on model performance and user experience instead of managing complex underlying infrastructure.
Customer Base and Market Position
Baseten counts companies including Cursor, Notion, Lovable, Harvey, HubSpot, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Decagon and Parallel among the teams using its platform. These businesses are developing products in which AI capabilities form a central part of the customer experience, increasing the importance of reliable and cost-effective model deployment. Baseten said its multi-cloud architecture enables customers to run workloads across different providers without becoming dependent on a single infrastructure vendor.
Expansion Plans
The new capital will be directed toward additional compute capacity, software development, research and enterprise go-to-market efforts. Baseten plans to triple its headcount this year as it expands engineering, operations, research and commercial teams. The company said these investments are intended to support customers that are moving AI from experimental projects to core components of their products and business models.
Baseten’s Series F highlights the scale of capital now flowing into the AI inference layer as demand grows for specialized, production-ready models. The company is betting that long-term competitive advantage will increasingly depend on businesses owning and improving intelligence built around their own data and workflows. With a $13 billion headline valuation and accelerated investment plans, Baseten is positioning itself as a major infrastructure provider for the next phase of enterprise AI adoption.