Baseten, a startup providing an AI inference platform, is finalizing a new $1.5 billion funding round at a valuation of up to $13 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported — just months after its last mega round.
June 18, 2026 · AI Inference
Baseten Closes In On $1.5B Round at Up to $13B
The inference startup — betting on cheaper open-source alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic — is finalizing a mega-round just five months after its last, its valuation swelling roughly sixfold in half a year.
$13B
Target valuation (in talks)
$1.5B
Round being finalized
~1,900%
Annualized revenue YoY growth
Valuation: ~6× in just over half a year
Each block ≈ $1B — column height scales with valuation.
Annualized revenue, in months
3× in three months — the "inference gold rush."
~30% the cost
On certain tasks, open models served via Baseten run at roughly a third the cost of closed models.
Via speculative decoding, disaggregated serving and KV cache, orchestrated across ~20 cloud providers.
The inference layer: who plays where
Baseten
Up to $13B
Software + multi-cloud optimization
Fireworks AI
$4B
Inference platform (Oct 2024)
Cerebras
Post-IPO
Inference-specialized chips
Rather than hardware, Baseten differentiates through software optimization spanning multiple clouds — deploying DeepSeek, Llama and Gemma as API endpoints within seconds. Customers include Cursor, Notion, Mercor, OpenEvidence and Abridge.
Still "finalizing." The round uses a dual-tiered structure — some investors enter at an $11B valuation — and remains at the reportedly/finalizing stage, so the final amount and valuation are not yet set. If
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