By Byron Kaye<\/p>\n
SYDNEY, June 23 (Reuters) – Baseten, a California-based artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Australians, said it raised $1.5 \u200cbillion in a funding round that valued the company \u200cat $13 billion, underscoring the surge of capital flowing into AI firms.<\/p>\n
The round was \u200bled by U.S.-based investors Sands Capital and Wellington Management, Baseten said late on Monday. Top Australian venture capital firm Blackbird VC said it contributed the firm’s biggest-ever investment, without specifying an amount.<\/p>\n
Baseten \u200csells software and infrastructure \u2060that let companies customise their own AI models, using what it says is a cheaper alternative \u2060to providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n
The company said its revenue has grown 20-fold over the past year as demand rises for “inference” \u2014 \u200bthe stage \u200bwhere trained AI models generate \u200boutputs in real-world applications.<\/p>\n
The \u200cdeal is Baseten’s fourth capital raising in 18 months and highlights investor appetite for companies supplying infrastructure to commercialise generative AI.<\/p>\n
“It’s a signal of conviction,” said Blackbird partner Michael Tolo in a phone interview, describing his firm’s decision to increase its stake.<\/p>\n
He \u200csaid Blackbird’s latest outlay may be \u200bthe biggest to date by an \u200bAustralian venture capital firm.<\/p>\n
For \u200bcompanies building AI into their tech systems, Baseten \u200ccompetes with companies like OpenAI and \u200bAnthropic at \u200ba lower price, and “this is the biggest shift that we’ve seen in both unit economics and competitive leverage within \u200bthe AI market so \u200cfar”, Tolo said.<\/p>\n
Baseten said it would use the funds \u200bto expand computing capacity, software and hiring.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Byron \u200bKaye; Editing by Jamie Freed)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Byron Kaye SYDNEY, June 23 (Reuters) – Baseten, a California-based artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Australians, said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,44812,44810,44811],"class_list":["post-82583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-blackbird","tag-blackbird-vc","tag-sands-capital-and-wellington-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}