Compute power leasing service provider Baseten is set to finalize $1.5 billion in financing, with its valuation climbing to $13 billion on a double-layer basis.

According to Beating Monitoring, AI inference service provider Baseten is finalizing a new round of $1.5 billion in financing. Compared with the plan discussed three months ago to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, the final financing amount has increased by $500 million. The valuation has also been adjusted to a dual structure: some investors subscribe at an $11 billion valuation, while others follow along at a $13 billion valuation. This round is jointly led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, and Wellington Management, and it is also Wellington Management’s first investment in the AI inference track.

Baseten builds a software layer on top of the computing power from 20 cloud service providers, helping enterprises fine-tune and run open-source models. Current customers include the programming assistant Cursor, Mercor, and OpenEvidence. As open-source models such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and NVIDIA Nemotron are nearing closed-source frontier models in performance, enterprises are starting to shift to hybrid architectures to control costs. Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava said that for specific tasks, switching to open-source models costs only 30% of closed-source models.

The boom in open-source models has driven strong demand for underlying computing power, and Baseten’s revenue has surged as well. By the end of Q1 2026, annual recurring revenue has grown from $200 million at the start of the quarter to $600 million, a 20-fold increase compared with the same period last year. However, because Baseten rents GPUs from cloud giants and then resells them, it faces the risk of squeezed gross margins. Even with concerns about profitability, typically cautious institutional investors such as Wellington Management still entered the market and completed their first investment in the AI inference track—an industry signal that the compute intermediary sector has long-term staying power.