Mining Power Rental Service Provider Baseten is planning to finalize a $1.5 billion fundraise, pushing its dual-layer valuation to $13 billion.

Per monitoring from DataBeat’s Beating, AI inference service provider Baseten is wrapping up a new $15 billion funding round. Three months ago, the company was discussing a $10 billion raise tied to a $110 billion valuation—now the final funding size has grown by $5 billion, with a two-tier valuation structure in place: some investors are subscribing at the $110 billion mark, while another group co-invests at a $130 billion valuation. Leading the round are Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management; the latter is making its debut investment in the AI inference space. Baseten builds a software layer across 20 cloud service providers’ computing infrastructure to help enterprises fine-tune and run open-source AI models. Its current customers include coding assistant Cursor, Mercor, and OpenEvidence. As open-source models from DeepSeek, Kimi, and NVIDIA Nemotron approach the performance of top closed-source alternatives, companies are shifting to hybrid architectures to control costs. Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava stated that switching to open-source models for specific tasks costs just 30% of what closed-source options require. The boom in open-source models has driven surging demand for underlying computing power, fueling sharp revenue growth for Baseten. By the end of Q1 2026, the company’s annualized recurring revenue (ARR) rose from $2 billion at the start of the quarter to $6 billion—a 20x jump compared to the same period last year. That said, Baseten faces margin pressure: it relies on leasing GPUs from cloud giants and reselling them to clients. Despite profit concerns, Wellington Management—typically a cautious institutional investor—has joined the round, marking its first foray into the AI inference market. Industry experts view this move as a sign of enduring momentum in the computing intermediary sector.