AI INFERENCE STARTUP BASETEN TRIPLED ITS VALUATION IN FIVE MONTHS AND IS NOW RAISING ONE AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS Baseten, a startup that handles the infrastructure needed to run AI models at scale, is closing in on a one and a half billion dollar funding round at a valuation of thirteen billion dollars. That figure represents a tripling of the company’s five billion dollar valuation from just January of this year. What is driving the growth is not hype but demand. Baseten tripled its annualized revenue from two hundred million to six hundred million dollars in a single quarter, a number that is genuinely difficult to achieve at that scale. The round is structured as a split-price deal with some investors entering at an eleven billion dollar floor and others paying the full thirteen billion headline number. Lead investors include Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Wellington Management. Nvidia participated in the previous round. The company has not formally confirmed the raise. What Baseten sells is inference infrastructure, meaning the compute layer that sits between an AI model and the people actually using it. As AI usage scales from millions to billions of queries per day, inference becomes its own infrastructure category worth fighting over. The battle for the AI stack is not just about who trains the best model. It is increasingly about who runs them most efficiently when real users are hitting them around the clock. Baseten is betting that is a market worth at least thirteen billion dollars. The investors appear to agree. Keywords: Baseten AI inference funding, Baseten $1.5 billion raise, AI inference startup, AI infrastructure investment