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Baseten founders Phillip Howes, Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat and Pankaj Gupta. Credit: Baseten.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPublished on\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Blackbird invested more than $200 million in Californian startup Baseten\u2019s Series F, backing the Australian-founded AI infrastructure startup\u2019s plan to drastically reduce the cost of AI deployment.<\/p>\n
Baseten founders Phillip Howes, Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat and Pankaj Gupta. Credit: Baseten.<\/p>\n
Key Takeaways<\/p>\n
Blackbird has invested over $200 million in Baseten, its biggest ever single investment.<\/p>\n
Baseten is a Californian startup with two Australians among its four founders.<\/p>\n
The startup creates infrastructure that it says saves businesses money on AI compute and lets them retain data produced by customers using their software.<\/p>\n
Baseten raised US$1.5 billion in its Series F, valuing it at US$13 billion. Blackbird also invested in its Series E earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Blackbird has invested over $200 million in Californian AI startup Baseten\u2019s Series F, a US$1.5 billion round ($2.15 billion) that values the company at US$13 billion ($18.5 billion), in what the Sydney VC says is its biggest ever single investment.<\/p>\n
Baseten counts two Australians among its four founders, which Blackbird says fulfils its mandate to support Australian and New Zealand entrepreneurs \u2013 wherever their companies may be domiciled.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday the best companies need to be global from very early on, so the fact that it\u2019s in California with Australian founders doesn\u2019t change the logic too much,\u201d Blackbird investor Tristan Edwards told Forbes Australia, noting that around 80 per cent of Baseten\u2019s research team is Australian too.<\/p>\n
The investment follows Blackbird participating in Baseten\u2019s February Series E. The startup says it reduces the costs of enterprise AI through boosting the efficiency of inferencing \u2013 that is, accessing AI models hosted in data centres \u2013 and helping companies train open-source models for their specific operations rather than relying on more costly AI made by Big Tech.<\/p>\n
Its pitch is well timed, considering the concerns spreading in some quarters around the rising cost of cutting-edge models developed by Anthropic and ChatGPT. Uber burned through a year\u2019s worth of compute budget in four months<\/a> in the most high profile example of the rising cost of tokens causing a rethink in how AI is applied. Baseten\u2019s customers include Cursor, Notion and Australia\u2019s Heidi Health. <\/p>\n Baseten\u2019s revenue is up around 2,000 per cent in the past year, according to Blackbird. Net dollar retention, a SaaS metric that measures how much a company forecasts it\u2019ll earn from existing customers, beat annual estimates in just a quarter. <\/p>\n \u201cIf they had met their milestones, we would have loved the company,\u201d Edwards said of Blackbird\u2019s decision to make its largest investment yet. \u201cThe fact that they beat them by three quarters is just incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n Blackbird\u2019s big bet earned it participating investor status in the round, which was led by Spark Capital (US$15 billion in assets under management), Altimeter Capital (US$6.75 billion) and early-stage VC Conviction. <\/p>\n \u201cFor the first time, Blackbird has invested >$200 million in a single round,\u201d Blackbird partner and co-founder Niki Scevak wrote in an X post<\/a>. \u201cFor the greats of the AI application layer, open source models have turned negative gross margins into positive ones and offer a longer-term pathway into outcompeting Anthropic\/OpenAI.\u201d<\/p>\n Though Baseten is very much a Californian startup, two of its four co-founders are Australian. Chief executive Tuhin Srivastava moved to the US after high school to study finance, and is an alumnus of Macquarie after an investment banking stint at the Millionaire Factory\u2019s New York office. Meanwhile chief scientist Phillip Howes got a PhD from the University of Sydney before moving to San Francisco in 2013.<\/p>\n The pair previously co-founded Shape, a data analytics startup that was acquired by Reflektive in 2018 and which Blackbird also backed. Srivastava remains connected to Sydney\u2019s startup scene in his capacity as Venture Partner at Athletic Ventures. <\/p>\n Want to see more Forbes articles on your feed?\u00a0Tap here to make Forbes Australia a preferred source on Google.<\/a><\/p>\n Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world.\u00a0Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0become a member here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published on June 23, 2026 Blackbird invested more than $200 million in Californian startup Baseten\u2019s Series F, backing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":756779,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,17162,254,255,64,63,122666,99,1874,5476,3324,201,105,1485],"class_list":["post-756778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-blackbird","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-investing","tag-productivity","tag-startup","tag-technology","tag-venture-capital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}