Baseten just raised $1.5B at $13B valuation. Enterprises are voting with their wallets against OpenAI's pricing.

Baseten is finalizing a $1.5 billion round at a $13 billion valuation.

Five months ago it was worth $5 billion. Now it's 2.6x that.

Why? Because enterprises are quietly routing around OpenAI and Anthropic's pricing.

Baseten lets companies run open-source models through 20 cloud providers at a fraction of proprietary costs. One customer cut a specific workload to 30% of what OpenAI charges.

The company hit $600 million in annualized revenue. Up from $200 million in December. That's 3x growth in six months.

This is the real enterprise AI story nobody is talking about.

Your CFO is asking why you're paying $15 per million tokens for GPT-4 when an open-source model does the same job for $3. Your competitors already know the answer.

The inference layer is where the margin collapse happens. Not in training. Not in fine-tuning. In the moment a model actually runs a query. And right now, the company winning that layer isn't OpenAI.

Audit your inference spend today. If you're single-vendored on a proprietary API, you're subsidizing someone else's margin while your competitors cut costs 70%.

SOURCE: https://www.citybiz.co/article/862284/baseten-lands-1-5b-raise-hits-13b-valuation-as-demand-grows-for-lower-cost-ai-models/
VERIFIED: citybiz (June 18, 2026), DigitrendZ (June 19, 2026), TechCrunch AI (June 18, 2026)
SIGNAL: Enterprise AI spending is bifurcating — proprietary frontier models for hard tasks, open-source inference for everything else. The vendors controlling the inference layer capture the margin, not the model makers.