Modal in Talks at $15B, Baseten at $26B as Inference Booms

Modal Labs is in talks to raise money at roughly a $15 billion valuation, about triple its worth in a round four months ago, Bloomberg reported. Baseten is separately discussing a round at about $26 billion, up from $13 billion in June, with Axios Pro first to peg the number.

Both firms sell platforms that "help businesses run artificial intelligence models," per Bloomberg, and both are riding demand for inference, the process of running AI systems after they have been trained.

Neither round has closed. Bloomberg writes that "the discussions have not produced completed rounds, and the amount of capital either startup hopes to raise is unclear."

The pace of the markups is what stands out. Modal's May round pegged the company at $4.65 billion; a $15 billion mark would roughly triple that in about four months. Baseten's June round put it at $13 billion; the mooted $26 billion doubles it in three.

Inference infrastructure has been a heavily covered beat this quarter, with more than ninety stories in our Inference tracker since June.