Baseten is finalizing a $1.5 billion fundraising round to support its inference software layer that enables customers to run, optimize and train open-source artificial intelligence models, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (June 18).
The round will have a dual-tiered structure in which some participants will invest at an $11 billion valuation and others at a $13 billion valuation, according to the report.
Baseten’s latest round reflects the growing demand for inference as companies look to use open-source models as a much-lower-cost alternative to increasingly expensive closed-source models, the report said.
Companies can download open-source models at no cost, modify them to meet their needs, and turn to a company like Baseten for the inference software layer and computing capacity. Baseten sources computing power from 20 different cloud providers, per the report.
Baseten Co-Founder and CEO Tuhin Srivastava told the WSJ: “At the highest level, what’s happening generally in the market is that the open-source models are getting very, very good. And as open-source gets better, we are growing with it.”
It was reported in May that Baseten was holding talks with investors to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation and that some investors were making offers valuing the company at around $15 billion.
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That report said that at the end of the first quarter, Baseten’s annualized revenue came to around $600 million, compared to $200 million at the beginning of the quarter. The report attributed the growth to an explosion of apps using open-source AI models, which has been a boon for Baseten and other inference providers.
Basten was valued at $5 billion in a January Series E funding round in which it raised $300 million. That round followed a September 2025 Series D round in which it was valued at $2.15 billion and raised $150 million.
Following the September round, Srivistava told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview: “For us, inference is one part of AI infrastructure. Beyond that, there’s training, evaluation, fine-tuning. We really want to own that entire loop. We want to build the next AWS for inference.”
When announcing the Series E in a January blog post, the company’s co-founders wrote that they started Baseten with the belief that inference would become the link between AI’s promise and its real-world impact. They added that the demand for inference is accelerating.
“As AI becomes embedded in every product and workflow, inference isn’t just growing — it’s becoming one of the largest markets ever created,” they wrote. “We’re building the software that powers it.”
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