{"id":506955,"date":"2026-06-18T23:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T23:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/506955\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T23:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T23:33:09","slug":"ai-inference-startup-baseten-reportedly-raising-1-5b-months-after-its-last-mega-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/506955\/","title":{"rendered":"AI inference startup Baseten reportedly raising $1.5B months after its last mega-round"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">AI inference company Baseten is close to finalizing a stunning $1.5 billion funding round at a $13 billion valuation, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/tech\/ai\/the-13-billion-ai-startup-betting-on-cheaper-alternatives-to-openai-anthropic-b9679603?mod=tech_lead_pos1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">the Wall Street Journal reports<\/a>. Just five months ago, the startup announced that it had raised a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baseten.co\/blog\/announcing-baseten-s-300m-series-e\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">$300 million Series E<\/a> at a $5 billion valuation. And that round was just nine months after raising a <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.baseten.co\/blog\/announcing-baseten-150m-series-d\/\" target=\"_blank\">$150 million Series D.<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If finalized, this latest round would represent a 160% increase in valuation in less than half a year. However, the WSJ reports that this is a <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2026\/03\/03\/why-ai-startups-are-selling-the-same-equity-at-two-different-prices\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">split-priced round<\/a>, a tactic startups are using to boost their headline valuation and make lead investors look good on paper. Some investors in this latest funding round are reportedly coming in at a $13 billion valuation, while others at $11 billion, sources told the Journal. This deal is said to be co-led by Spark Capital, Sands Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Wellington Management.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Launched in 2019, Baseten is a startup benefiting from what The Next Wave hailed the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/baseten-1-5bn-round-13bn-valuation-ai-inference\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">inference gold rush<\/a>,\u201d in which VCs are pouring enormous amounts of money into companies building the inference layer. Inference is what the model does after a user submits a prompt. Baseten promises to handle inference quickly while controlling costs by routing requests to the best-for-task model, especially to competent, less-expensive open source alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI inference company Baseten is close to finalizing a stunning $1.5 billion funding round at a $13 billion&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,88478,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-506955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-inference","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}