San Francisco AI startup Baseten nears $2 billion raise at up to $30 billion value, Bloomberg reports

Baseten, a San Francisco startup that runs AI models for other companies, is close to raising about $2 billion at a value of up to $30 billion, Bloomberg reported Oct. 30, citing people familiar with the talks.

The money would come in two parts, the first valuing Baseten at $26 billion and the second at $30 billion, the report said.  Existing investor Sands Capital is expected to lead.  Baseten was valued at $13 billion in June, when it raised $1.5 billion, so its value would more than double in about four months.

What Baseten does

Building an AI model is called training.  Using it, every time someone asks a chatbot a question or an app generates text, is called inference, and it takes computing power each time.  Baseten rents out that power and the software to run models quickly and cheaply.  Its website lists customers including Cursor, a coding app, and Notion, a note-taking app.

Investors are betting inference spending will keep climbing as more businesses use AI.  Rival Fireworks AI raised $1.5 billion at a $17.5 billion value in July, according to the report.

Who Baseten competes with

Baseten does not make chips or own data centers.  Customers bring an AI model, and Baseten keeps it running quickly on graphics processors, or GPUs, the chips most AI runs on, which it rents from more than 20 cloud companies, the company says.  That puts it in a crowded field, and some of its rivals are also its suppliers.

Groq is the most direct rival.  The California chipmaker runs popular AI models on its own chips through a service called GroqCloud and charges developers by use, the same customers Baseten courts.  In December, Groq licensed its chip technology to Nvidia, and founder Jonathan Ross and other staff joined Nvidia; Groq said it remains independent and GroqCloud keeps running.

CoreWeave, a New Jersey company that rents out huge clusters of Nvidia GPUs, is both rival and supplier.  It sells its own service for running AI models, yet it is also one of the cloud companies whose computers Baseten uses, according to Baseten's list of outside providers.  Crusoe, which builds AI data centers and rents out their computing power, is in the same spot:  it offers a managed service for running models and also supplies Baseten with computing power in the U.S. and Ireland, Baseten's list shows.

Baseten's pitch against all of them is that it spreads each customer's model across many clouds, so an outage or shortage at one does not take an app down.

Baseten did not respond to a request for comment, and Sands Capital declined to comment, according to the report.

Source:  Bloomberg, Oct. 30, 2026, as summarized by Investing.com; Baseten, Baseten engineering blog and Baseten subprocessor list; Groq, Dec. 24, 2025; CoreWeave; Crusoe.