Inference Firm Baseten Eyes Funding Round at $11 Billion Valuation

Artificial intelligence (AI) inference startup Baseten has reportedly been holding talks with investors to raise $1 billion.

That funding would value the company at $11 billion, The Information reported Tuesday (May 26), citing a source familiar with the matter. Baseten was valued at $5 billion earlier this year.

According to the report, the fundraising follows a period of strong revenue growth for Baseten, which rents Nvidia AI servers to application developers and helps them train, customize and operate chiefly open-source AI models.

At the end of the first quarter of this year, the company’s annualized revenue—its previous month’s revenue multiplied by 12—came to around $600 million, compared to $200 million at the beginning of the quarter, the source said.

That’s 20 times the annualized revenue the company was bringing in in March of last year, a level of growth that encouraged some investors to make offers valuing Baseten at around $15 billion, the source added.

The Information noted that an explosion of apps built using open-source AI models has been a boon for Baseten and other inference providers.

Rival company Modal recently raised at a $4.65 billion valuation—more than the $2 billion it was targeting—after its annualized revenue jumped to $300 million, while Together AI raised at a $7.5 billion valuation recently after exceeding $1 billion in annualized revenue.

PYMNTS spoke last year with Baseten Co-founder and CEO Tuhin Srivastava after the company raised $150 million. That report outlined the company’s “Inference Stack,” which includes flexible deployment options (cloud, hybrid, self-hosted), support for open-source models and enterprise-grade concerns (latency, cost, reliability).

“Our biggest customers five years from now don’t exist today,” Srivastava told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “These companies are being founded today, and they can move fast because they don’t have decades of history weighing them down.”

Webster asked whether large enterprises can keep pace, arguing that consumers now expect businesses to “totally get with the program.”

”They want to move fast. I even think they can move fast from a technology perspective,” said Srivastava. “Where it’s harder is justifying ROI because they’re so big—and they have more to lose with the existing customer set.”

Still, that report added, the pressure can’t be dismissed.

“Six years ago, when we used to go talk to enterprises, they would be like, oh, why should we care?” Srivastava added. “It was almost like, convince me I should care. Right now, it’s like, how do I get to the point where I can embrace this?”