AI infrastructure startup Baseten is in talks to raise about $2 billion in new funding that would more than double its valuation to about $30 billion, Bloomberg reported on October 30, citing people familiar with the discussions. The proposed round would be structured in two tranches, with the first valuing the company at $26 billion and the second at $30 billion, and existing investor Sands Capital is expected to lead.
Baseten sells software and computing capacity for running trained AI models, a business known as inference. The company has become one of the fastest-rising names in that market as businesses shift from training giant models to deploying them at scale, and the reported terms would mark a sharp re-rating in just four months.
A valuation more than doubled in four months
Baseten was last valued at $13 billion in June, when it closed a $1.5 billion Series F financing. That round itself was split across two valuation tranches, at $11 billion and $13 billion, and the company said at the time that its revenue had grown 20-fold over the preceding year.
The new discussions build on that momentum. Reports in September had already put a $26 billion valuation on the table; the second tranche at $30 billion is the new element, lifting the prospective top mark to roughly 2.3 times the June valuation. The round has not closed, and its final size and participants could still change.
Why investors are paying up for inference
Inference has emerged as one of the most contested corners of the AI buildout. Training a frontier model grabs headlines, but serving millions of daily requests is where providers earn recurring revenue, and capacity there is scarce. Baseten has positioned itself as a lower-cost alternative to running workloads through the biggest model providers, and its backers include Altimeter Capital, IVP and Spark Capital alongside Sands Capital.
Rivals are raising at similar speed. Inference competitor Fireworks AI raised $1.5 billion in July at a $17.5 billion valuation, and the wider market for AI computing has drawn tens of billions in fresh capital this year even as investors grow warier of the sector's spending. A $30 billion mark for Baseten would sit well above Fireworks and underline how much value investors now place on the layer that puts models to work.
What is still unconfirmed
Several details remain open. The reports do not name investors beyond Sands Capital, nor do they say whether the two tranches would close at the same time or on a staggered schedule. Baseten has not publicly confirmed the talks, and Bloomberg's account notes that the discussions have not produced a completed round.
If the financing closes on the reported terms, it would rank among the largest AI infrastructure rounds of the year and set a new benchmark for pure-play inference companies. The next signals to watch are a formal announcement, the full investor list, and whether the $30 billion second tranche holds as public markets continue to question AI spending.
