BASETEN RAISES $1.5 BILLION AS AI INFERENCE BECOMES THE MOST CONTESTED BATTLEGROUND IN TECH AI inference, the process of actually running a model to generate a response, is becoming its own industry. Baseten just raised $1.5 billion in a Series F round at a valuation of up to $13 billion, one of the largest AI infrastructure raises ever recorded outside of the foundation model labs themselves. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, and Spark Capital. The company processes more than one billion inference calls every day across 87 clusters and 18 different cloud providers. It has grown revenue roughly 20 times year over year. What Baseten does is build the systems software that sits between a model and an application. Every AI product needs this layer: the infrastructure that handles GPUs, autoscaling, observability, billing, and developer tooling so that the people building the application do not have to think about the plumbing. As model capabilities have converged, with open-source models approaching closed-source frontier performance at a fraction of the cost, the inference layer has become where real competition happens. The question is no longer which model is best. The question is who can serve it fastest, most reliably, and at the lowest cost. Baseten is betting that companies will pay for an expert to handle that problem rather than build it themselves. Investors just handed them $1.5 billion to prove it. Keywords: Baseten funding AI inference, AI infrastructure investment, AI Series F 2026, AI compute platform